GIRLHOOD AND THE FEMINIST IMAGINARY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY TRANSATLANTIC WOMEN’S LITERATURE

By

Tracy Wendt Lemaster

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

(English)

at the

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON 2012

Date of final oral examination: 09/27/12

The dissertation is approved by the following members of the Final Oral Committee: Susan S. Friedman, Professor, English and Gender and Women’s Studies Thomas Schaub, Professor, English Jeffrey Steele, Professor, English Ellen Samuels, Assistant Professor, Gender and Women’s Studies Julie D’Acci, Professor, Gender and Women’s Studies

© Copyright by Tracy Wendt Lemaster 2012 All Rights Reserved i

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii

Dissertation Abstract iii

Introduction The Girl and the Woman Writer 1

Chapter One Girls’ Studies and Third Wave Feminism in Virginia Woolf’s 35 A Room of One’s Own and The Waves

Chapter Two Othering the Girl: Agency, Madness, and Puberty in Simone de 82 Beauvoir’s The Second Sex

Chapter Three Celie’s Psychodrama: Neuroscience, Teenage Cognition, and the 133 Epistolary Form in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

Chapter Four Girlhood Biopolitics in Sapphire’s Push: Obesity, Sexual Arousal, 173 and HIV Infection

Works Cited 218

ii Acknowledgements

I am so grateful to the many people who have helped me write this dissertation throughout the years. Foremost, I want to thank my advisor, Susan Friedman, for believing in this project’s focus on the relatively new, developing subfield field of Girls’ Studies, and for having the confidence in me to create literary dialogues with its interdisciplinary research.

Susan’s encouragement and insight was invaluable and I could not have asked for a better mentor. I would also like to thank Ellen Samuels for her steadfast support in my professionalization and suggestions of important frameworks in this project that shaped it overall. My remaining committee members, Tom Schaub, Jeffrey Steele, and Julie D’Acci, also contributed much-needed guidance and support for conceptualizing and writing this project.

Words cannot express my appreciation to my family for their love. My parents, Bob and

Terry, have supported my pursuit of literary studies since I was young. Their unending patience throughout me completing this PhD is remarkable, particularly in these final years when both distance and medical ailments made academics seem like less of a priority. They continue to encourage and value my work as selfless parents. My loving husband, Richard, made this degree possible with his emotional, intellectual, and practical support. He remains my hero and marrying him my greatest decision. This dissertation is, without question, for him. Finally, I write this acknowledgement section while seven months pregnant. My baby has grown and kicked inside me during many typing sessions. While I have not even met my first child, I know he/she is my greatest achievement, and my life’s personal and professional purpose.

iii Abstract

This dissertation demonstrates that the figure of the girl dominates scenes of writing in foundational twentieth-century feminist theory and literature, yet girls are collectively marginalized as these texts privilege theories of women’s authorship. I examine four texts that are emblematic of the theories of women’s creativity, feminisms, and historical moments of their time: Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Alice

Walker’s The Color Purple, and Sapphire’s Push. These texts, I argue, exhibit a latent textual

“anxiety” about girl culture as they theorize women’s writing and culture. Because they also foreground how the sexual self affects creativity, I examine girls’ embodied sexuality as distinct from adult women’s sexuality, revealing that psychosexual creative conflict in girlhood shapes authorship and activism. My project draws from the developing field of Girls’ Studies that treats female adolescence as its own subjectivity category. This is the first literary studies project to use

Girls’ Studies research on real teen girls’ neurology, biology, psychology, and sociology.

My project argues that girlhood writing and sexuality follow a trajectory in the texts under consideration of increasing feminist recognition and development. The girl writer progresses from an abstract, imagined image of writing in Virginia Woolf to a representational subject analyzing her own process of writing in Sapphire. Across these four texts, girlhood sexuality progresses from allegories of the girl’s conflicted sexual self-consciousness to explicit descriptions by the girl protagonist of her body’s sexual development, disease, and sensation.

Chapter 1 on A Room of One’s Own shows that girls surface as allegorical figures without voice who fictionalize Woolf’s theories of women’s circumscribed authorship. Using Girls’ Studies social science research on real girls’ articulations of their sexual self-consciousness, I argue that

Woolf’s scenes of girls’ artistic/erotic writing reflect social censorship of girls’ sexuality. iv Chapter 2 on The Second Sex shows that Beauvoir treats the girl as an actual agent of written material through her frequent, brief excerpts of real adolescent girls’ writings. While Beauvoir reflects openly on girls’ sexual feelings as demonstrated by their writings, she theorizes that the girl’s maturational body and narrative modes are detrimental to the psychological self, which I challenge with empirical research on teen girls’ textual agency. Chapter 3 on The Color Purple shows that Walker offers a sustained, direct representation of the girl writer as she questions her sexual body and sexual identity, questioning that distinguishes the girl’s empowerment. I apply neuroscientific studies on teenage cognitive impairment from sexual abuse to representations of

Celie and Nettie’s psychological modes, arguing that the novel’s epistolary form portrays a single psyche split by sexual trauma into different aspects of developmental girlhood. My final chapter on Sapphire’s Push examines how Precious explicitly describes her prematurely developed, traumatically aroused, and HIV-positive teen body while she self-consciously reflects on the act of writing and on herself as a “poet.” Using biological research on African American girls’ earlier menstruation and increasing HIV infection, I argue that Precious’s sexual states cause slippage in her social signification as a teen girl, making her biopolitical embodiment highlight age as intersecting racial invisibility.

Lastly, this dissertation demonstrates that women authors’ textual negotiation of girlhood subjectivity and sexuality reflects an epistemological tension regarding the place of the girl in feminist theory. Girlhood contrasts feminist discourses on maturity, autonomy, and individualism as defining the subject. Girlhood also contradicts the validation of feminist consciousness through struggles, experience, and knowledge acquired in adulthood. If Women’s

Studies often defines feminist subjectivity against qualities associated with youth, then discounting girls could be seen as theoretically necessary for defining feminism. The girl’s v paradoxical imbrication yet marginalization within feminist subjecthood surfaces in how the authors in my project use “the girl” as an anxious aesthetic strategy for representing the emergent woman writer. By examining girlhood identity politics in literature theorizing women’s identity politics, I show how the girl evolves in feminist imaginaries from an integral though marginalized trope in feminist theory about women to the central figure articulating feminist politics about girls.

1 Introduction: The Girl and the Woman Writer

Sometimes I think inside me is a girl child who refuses to die. She has become a dark metaphoric creature. . . . She flaps her wings so that I can learn to look and see, so I can write. Meena Alexander, “Lyric in a Time of Violence” (25)

In the 2004 essay collection, Word: On Being a [Woman] Writer, where well-known international authors examine, embrace, and expand ideas of “the woman writer,” representations of girls and girlhood writing surface throughout. The Preface, for example, imagines both a literal audience of youth reading the anthology and a psychically-present youthful self when writing as an adult. Biographical references to writing and publishing in the teen years frequently occur in contributor summaries preceding the essays. Literary representations of girlhood authorship, embodiment, and sexuality appear in the majority of the collection. Notably, several essays focus exclusively on girls, such as June Jordan’s piece on Phillis Wheatley that honors

“this girl, this first Black poet in America” as a “genius teenager” (172-73). My dissertation engages these various evocations of “the girl” – as living subject, as literary representation, as psychic figuration, and as aesthetic strategy – in questions of women’s authorship. Overall, I ask, where is “the girl” in “the woman writer”?

I argue that girls dominate scenes of writing and modes of narrativity in foundational twentieth-century feminist literature, yet girls are collectively marginalized to privilege theories of women, women’s writing, and women’s social position. The girl’s simultaneous dominance and dubiousness in scenes of writing is evident in the writers’ use of palimpsest, rhetorical shift, psychodrama, overrepresentation, and allegory. These formal treatments reveal a latent textual

“anxiety” about girl culture in literature theorizing women’s culture. My project draws from the developing field of Girls’ Studies that treats girlhood as its own life phase distinct from childhood and womanhood. Girls’ Studies helps to show that Women’s Studies has often defined 2 feminist subjectivity against an immaturity, triviality, sexual ignorance, and political disinterest associated with girlhood. With discussions of girls in Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Alice

Walker, and Sapphire, I show how these influential feminist authors demonstrate an intense yet anxious preoccupation specifically with girlhood subjectivity as its own identity category, and with girlhood sexuality as a site for devising textuality. I am guided in my choice of texts by their foregrounding of “women’s literary history,” “women’s situation,” and “womanist” feminism, so that I can analyze how girlhood identity politics operate in theories of women’s identity politics. Because these authors also foreground how the sexual self affects creativity, this study looks particularly at female adolescent sexuality as an embodied experience distinct from adult female sexuality. This is the first literary studies project to draw on Girls’ Studies research in neurology, biology, psychology, and sociology on real teen girls’ sexual identities, sexual experiences, and sexual bodies. I am using this Girls’ Studies scientific research to offer sociohistorical contexts for the feminist texts in my project. Girls’ Studies research also mobilizes discourse of “the girl” in these feminist texts about women, showing that these texts anticipate scientific findings on girls.

In texts critically received for theorizing women’s creativity, I explore how the figure of the girl functions in feminist creative imaginaries and philosophies. My chapter on Woolf establishes the girl’s centrality to scenes of writing and to the feminist imaginary by revealing

Woolf’s rhetorical shifts between the terms “girl” and “woman” when fictionalizing narrativity versus theorizing narrativity. Suggesting that scenes of girls’ artistic/erotic writing portray social censorship of girlhood sexuality, I show that the girl becomes a central imaginative trope in

Woolf’s theory of women’s thwarted authorship. My chapter on Beauvoir extends the girl’s dominance in feminist treatments of writing by highlighting how Beauvoir’s section on female 3 adolescence is saturated with fiction and nonfiction excerpts on girls and by girls. Beauvoir grants girls an authorial voice in their own sexual self-conceptualizations, yet she theories that narrativity is detrimental to the girl’s psychology. I argue that Beauvoir structurally and argumentatively relies on negative discursive constructs of girlhood, making the social sign

“Girl,” not just “Woman,” a dominant trope in her philosophical imaginary. In Chapter three, I highlight that Walker’s definition of black “womanism” opposes “girlishness,” which positions the figure of the girl as central to yet contrasting her feminist philosophy. I then challenge

Walker’s theory by arguing that her novel depicts a single artistic imaginary bifurcated into two characters through sexual trauma, characters that dramatize different aspects of developmental girlhood through empowered epistolary letter-writing. I close my project with discussion of

Sapphire who does not use the girl to mobilize feminist philosophies about women like my previous authors, but treats girlhood as its own site of identity politics in female creative, sexual, and political expression. Sapphire interweaves the girl’s textual/sexual experience by having her protagonist learn the ABCs simultaneous with her diagnosis of AIDS/HIV. By analyzing representations of girl writers in feminist imaginaries, I revise feminist models of “the woman writer.” Overall, my project demonstrates the largely unrecognized dynamic trope in which women writers need to imagine a girl in order to enable their own act of writing.

This project takes as its starting point the notion that girlhood is its own identity category, thereby analyzing literary representations of girls writing while drawing on interdisciplinary research on real teen girls’ creativity and sexuality. The collection, Word: On Beng a [Woman]

Writer, demonstrates this awareness of girlhood as a lived, independent, and creative life stage by including the majority of its contributors who were once girl writers. In this collection on “the woman writer,” accompanying biographical summaries show that Meena Alexander published 4 her first poem at age fifteen, Jennifer DeMarco wrote her first book at ten and made the best- seller list for her novel at age nineteen, Eavan Boland published her first poetry collection at eighteen, June Jordan began writing poetry at seven, Edwidge Danticat started her “writing hobby” at nine (202), and Margaret Atwood, in her adult essay, declares in a youthful apologetic tone, “I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault” (139).

In addition to having written juvenilia, the authors in Word creatively depict girlhood as an identity category in their essays written as women, a representational focus that forms the core of my project. As part of her goal to break the cultural silence around women, Taslima Nasrin invented a new Bengali word, yebela, or “girlhood,” for her memoir, Amar Yebela (My

Girlhood). Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem portrays a girl who represents both a psychic part of herself and the deceased poet Reetika Vazirani whom Fadem never met, where the three have been “waiting all these years to finish the story”: “I was having an extraordinary conversation with a girl. A girl who looked like, me. A girl who thought flowerbeds were sleeping beds. A girl who vanished” (190). In an example uniting these authors’ treatments of the girl as lived, remembered, and representational identity, the collection’s Foreword by Suheir Hammad suggests that memory of one’s girlhood exists for the woman writer on a psychic level where

“you are thirty years old” but “that part of you, that eleven-year-old girl, is awakened and alert”

(xi-xii). She then unites concepts of “the girl” as a psychological presence with the literal presence of girl readers: “You, dear reader, are probably not eleven (but you could be), but there is an eleven-year old right there, just beneath your hardened skin” (xii). Connecting these subjects to writing, she declares to adult women, to actual girls who form “tomorrow’s . . . generation” of woman writers, and to psychologically resonant girlhoods, “you have something to offer. All you have are your poems” (xii-xiii). The focus of these authors on real and 5 representational girlhoods within the experience of writing aligns with my project’s examination of “the girl” in both literature and the sciences, and my treatment of the girl as both artistic representation and creator of knowledge. Finally, these authors’ repeated figurations of “the girl” as a symbolic element of their creative psychology aligns with this project’s interest in exploring how fictional girls reveal the woman artist’s psychosocial positionality.

Feminist narratives often imbricate issues of girlhood identity and adolescent sexuality in the formation of the woman writer. In the Word collection, Eavan Boland conflates biological and political histories when asking a new generation of women writers to recuperate the past literary tradition that once excluded women by “eroticic[zing] a poetic tradition in the way in which [she] eroticized [her] own history” (214). “By eroticizing,” she explains, “it allowed me not only to enter the story, but to change it. And yet at seventeen my own sexuality was so rudimentary, so unformed that neither I nor anyone else would have thought it could have been an accurate guide to the history I inherited. I walked down that street of statues, a girl . . . . And yet my skin, my flesh, my sex—without learning any of this—stood as a subversive historian, ready to edit the text” (214). Boland notably points to the body—the girl body—as source for negotiating textuality. This theme is repeated often and explicitly, as when Luisa Valenzuela, focusing on ages “eleven” and “seventeen,” states, “I was—am—writing with the body. Writing with the body? Yes, I am aware of having done this throughout my life” (131). Exemplifying these authors’ frequent juxtaposition of girlhood, writing, and embodiment, Alia Mandouh recounts, “The questions of writing showed up” when “I was about to turn sixteen” and occurred within “[m]y body [which] was my primary refuge” such that “my body, the written and the writing [existed] simultaneously; the author” (40). Hammad autobiographically parallels her intimacy with writing to her maturational development: “By the time I had gotten my first period 6 I knew my only escape from the boredom . . . was books” so that in “high school I began to search out women writers, just as my body began to take its womanly shape” because “writers . .

. could only be readers. Only readers write” (xii-xiii). Hammad then steps back to theorize of women writers that “we write from the ‘in-skirts’— from our bodies”: “We will not entertain the nature versus nurture debate on women’s literature here, or class biases, or ‘culture wars,’ or even the cold shoulder most women of color writers still experience from all the limbs of the writing world. Look, we write out of our bodies” (xiii). Feminist scholars and women writers have, for decades, written about the complicated relationships women have to authorship and embodiment, particularly sexual embodiment, and their implications for literary form. My dissertation asks how memory of the teen body in the process of hormonal and sexual development surfaces in sexual/textual politics.

The literary works in my dissertation, and in the Word collection as a representative example, repeatedly focus on girlhood and writing often alongside notions of the body, challenging the model of “the woman writer” by considering girlhood subjectivity, creativity, and sexual embodiment in questions of female authorship. I would like to propose that these authors’ repeated invocations of “girls” in the context of “women” suggest that feminist theory on writing ought to consider the teen body and girlhood subjectivity. When exploring “women writers who face barriers,” bell hooks’s essay in Word focuses prominently on “girlhood writing” such that she self-identifies “as a writer” “when [she] was a young girl [and she] studied the lives of writers hoping to find guidance for [her] work” (17, 23). My project takes seriously hooks’s identity categories of “a young girl,” “a young writer and intellectual” by drawing on Girls’

Studies research on real adolescent and teen girls’ sexuality and creativity from multiple scientific fields (23). I frame chapters within specific studies, including research on obese and 7 minority girls’ earlier physical maturation and menstruation; patterns of brain development that characterize adolescence; links between girls’ sexual self-consciousness and their creativity; girls’ written forms as resistant practices to hegemonic gendered scripts; girls’ impaired cognition from sexual abuse; girls’ sexual arousal during sexual abuse; and African American girls’ growing HIV rates. Occasionally within these dominant frames, I will insert further Girls’

Studies research to develop or situate a specific literary point. These brief applications include research on girls’ psychological crises, loss of voice, eating disorders, hormonal fluctuations, subversive resistance, teen pregnancy, and global disenfranchisement and disappearance. The inquiries I make with this research do not deny that literary representations have no physical or psychological existence. Rather, these inquiries show that this research opens up formal and thematic elements in these representations, thereby re-visioning literary theories of feminist identity politics to centralize girlhood.

From Woolf to Sapphire

This dissertation analyzes four feminist texts from different decades of the twentieth- century, each representing the theories of women’s creativity and social roles prevalent in their eras: Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex

(1949), Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), and Sapphire’s Push (1996). I chose my texts by their critical reception as foundational feminist works on women, social agency, sex roles, and writing. I order these texts not only to follow historic chronology. I show that representation of “the girl” and girlhood writing becomes more developed and prominent across this literature, demonstrating the increasing salience of girlhood subjectivity and creative agency in feminist imaginaries. Because I have found that a dominant thematic connection among these works is that they center girls in scenes of writing, this project focuses its analyses specifically on 8 varying representations of “the girl writer.”

In these texts, the girl writer progresses from an allegorical construction in Woolf, to a theoretical construction in Beauvoir, to direct representations in Walker and Sapphire. Overall, girlhood identity changes from an abstract, imagined image of writing to a representational subject analyzing her own process of writing through excerpts in the text. I open with A Room of

One’s Own, where “girls” surface periodically as imagined allegorical figures without voice who fictionalize Woolf’s theories on women’s circumscribed authorship. Following this chapter on

Woolf’s rhetorical shifts between “girl” and “woman,” I show that Beauvoir’s The Second Sex instead devotes a sustained section to exploring female adolescence as its own identity phase.

She defines girlhood through girls’ fixation on creating narratives, including writing, daydreaming, acting, drawing, and lying. Furthermore, intermixes excerpts on fictional girls with excerpts from writings by real adolescent girls. Therefore, Beauvoir frames “the girl” as highly representational, like Woolf’s representational trope of fictionalizing the “the girl” in the scene of writing. However, by using excerpts from real adolescent and teen girls’ writings, Beauvoir treats “the girl” as an actual agent of written material, unlike Woolf who collapses scenes of girlhood writing into theory about “women’s authorship.” In The Color Purple, Walker opens by imbricating girlhood identity formation and the act of writing, developing Celie’s direct characterization through her written girlhood and adulthood. Celie’s continual writing concretizes the girl writer moreso than Beauvoir’s brief though frequent fictional and non- fictional excerpts on and by girls. Furthermore, Beauvoir theorizes that girlhood narrativity is detrimental to the girl’s agency whereas Walker portrays Celie’s writing as integral to cognitive empowerment. I close my dissertation with Sapphire’s Push, which uses The Color Purple as an intertext. Push represents Precious, a teen girl, in the act of trauma writing, the same genre in 9 which Celie wrote. Although Celie is critically received as a writer, there is no scene of composition in the entire novel. Conversely, Push portrays Precious self-consciously reflecting on the act of writing and on herself as a writer/“poet.” The novel shows her written material with its grammatical and syntactical errors lessening as she progresses. While Walker dramatizes the girl’s progression toward selfhood through literacy, Sapphire has the girl describe her progress consciously and self-reflexively. Furthermore, Precious has a more confident character voice than Celie, as she interrogates injustices through, I argue, assertions of age and girl subjectivity.

Therefore, Sapphire’s representation of the girl writer and of girlhood as a self-aware, empowered identity phase is more developed than the prior texts. In conclusion, I argue that representation of girlhood subjectivity and narrative agency increases from early to late twentieth-century feminist literature.

My project secondly argues that girlhood sexuality, including sexual embodiment, sexual self-awareness, and sexual sensation, follow a trajectory in the texts under consideration of increasing feminist recognition and development. I show that feminist authors portray girls’ acts of narrativity and writing as affected by psychosexual and social conflict. Girlhood sexuality in these texts progresses from allegories of the girl’s conflicted sexual self-consciousness, to theories of the girl’s maturational body causing “madness,” to psychodramatic representations of the girl’s impaired body and cognition from sexual abuse, to more direct representations of the girl’s early menstruation, HIV infection, and physical arousal. In these texts, representations of girlhood sexuality change from abstract references about girls’ thwarted connections with their sexual bodies to direct references where girls candidly comment on their sexual health and sexual sensations within new twentieth-century biopolitics. In the chapter on A Room of One’s

Own, I draw from research showing that real teen girls’ sexual self-consciousness is linked to 10 their larger conceptualizations of selfhood, agency, and power of artistic expression. I use this psychosexual link to show how Woolf’s allegories of girls’ creative desire draws from their sexual desire, and how Woolf’s scenes of girls faltering during the sustained act of writing reflects social censorship of girls’ sexuality. In the chapter on The Second Sex, Beauvoir reflects more openly on girls’ sexuality and sexual feelings, acknowledging sexual anatomy and even sexual abuse in case studies and girls’ diaries. Yet she uses mental disability rhetoric and institutionalization imagery to portray the girl’s maturational body and narrative modes as

“driving her mad.” Therefore, recognition of girlhood as a sexual identity category is stronger in

Beauvoir than in Woolf, though nonetheless demonized. In The Color Purple, Celie explores her sexual body’s functions after rape and, I argue, demonstrates impaired cognitive processes from sexual abuse. This first-person representation of girlhood sexual silencing and written expression offers a more developed and intimate account than Beauvoir’s, though most of Celie’s physical processes remain a mystery to her. My final chapter shows how Precious in Push candidly discusses her experiences as an HIV-positive teen girl who physically developed early, making representation of her embodiment, and her self-awareness of her embodiment, more direct.

Precious acquires knowledge of her HIV/AIDS with her ABC’s, making Precious’s writing express the paradox of an increasing intellect during biological decline. Foremost, Precious explicitly describes her sexual sensations in writing, including arousal during rape, portraying a sexually self-aware and socially critical character voice. My four texts show increasingly direct feminist representation and development of girlhood sexuality.

My methodology with these texts is to pair representations of literary “girls” with contemporary interdisciplinary research on real girls from the field of Girls’ Studies. By doing so, I am not saying these literary characters have a psychological or physical existence. My 11 intention is not to disregard the unique contexts for each set of references or to ignore that

“girlhood” is a culturally constructed and fluid concept. Rather than suggesting there’s a transhistorical essential girl, I am interested in the psychological and literary similarities across the century and several countries. Although I am dehistoricizing by applying contemporary interdisciplinary findings to twentieth-century literature from across the century, I am doing so in order to consider the transtemporal movement of texts, their ability to resonate across different time periods, and the reasons why they continue to matter. This approach requires recognizing the texts’ specificity by engaging their historically situated feminist theory, as well as recognizing the texts’ transhistorical dialogues and worldliness. My project does not aim to homogenize or condense the diverse literary histories of these works. Rather, I engage their distinct feminist philosophies as each uses “the girl” uniquely for portraying the teleology of the woman writer and activist. This approach involves reading for what is hidden, silenced, or repressed in a text’s particular cultural moment while also considering that the text is not only tied to its moment of creation but can be used to see what it offers contemporary literary, gender, and Girls’ Studies theories. I am interested in how interdisciplinary research on real girls helps to reveal formal patterns in fictional literature. In these texts, I link neurological, biological, sociological, and psychological research on girls to theories of narrative form. My use of interdisciplinary research on real girls always returns to arguments about aesthetic form.

Furthermore, the topic of “the girl” comes rhetorically, and organically, from these texts. I examine their use of the term “girl” alongside their representation of girlhoods.

In my project, I use the term “girl” in several ways. First, the Girls’ Studies interdisciplinary research I use focuses on “girls” in an age range of 10-18 years. Girls’ Studies demarcates the “girl” based on the body and maturation. While the field is equally concerned 12 with ideological constructs of the “girl” and varying cultural definitions that transcend physicality, pubertal development remains the lived timeframe within which these circulating contexts are theorized. Because I am engaging literary analysis of fictional representation, I treat the “girl” not only as a lived subjectivity but also as an aesthetic construct and artistic preoccupation. Although the word “girl” is historically and culturally contingent and has been used in fiction to refer to both preadolescent children and unmarried women, the fiction I use explicitly references characters’ ages. This fiction employs the term “girl” to refer to an age range of 10-18 years, which I parallel to corresponding ages in Girls’ Studies research.

Furthermore, many of these literary characters are negotiating the social signifier “girl,” and its accompanying racial and sexed ideologies, in their understanding of their own girlhood.

Therefore, the slipperiness of this term can be attributed to the complexity of competing experiences of the “girl,” prompting me to consider social constructs of the “girl” as they relate to characters’ fictionally lived girlhoods.

Age as an Axis of Identity in Interdisciplinary Girls’ Studies

Although literary scholars have become keenly aware of the influence of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality on the subject’s experience, age is not consistently added to this intersectional list. Additionally, Age Studies, a recent MLA Discussion Group, focuses on older age experiences, rather than holding dialogue with youth studies. Rosie White identifies age as an overlooked, dynamic category for marking difference interpersonally and psychologically:

“Age seems to be the last difference, the unspoken but inevitable site of difference not only between subjects but also a difference within subjects as they are exiled from their younger selves” (White and Bazin ii [itals in orig]). I adopt both these frames in my project where I separate representations of girls from women as well as analyze how memory of the teen 13 pubescent body surfaces in women authors’ textuality. By doing so, I define “age as a description of physiological change” as well as “a difference that is produced via a network of discursive formations” (White and Bazin iii).

Through prioritizing age, this project seeks an understanding of girlhood as a distinct form of subjectivity by moving beyond the traditional notion of female adolescence as the experience of “becoming woman.” Girls’ Studies scholar Lyn Mikel Brown and Nancy K. Miller classify candid expression of the intellectual and embodied experiences of girlhood as unwritten

“narratives,” arguing that “for a girl at the edge of adolescence to tell the truth about her life” would be “to protest against the available fiction of female becoming” (Miller 129), “to refuse the established story of a woman’s life,” and “to tell the truth of her life at the very point when she is invited into the larger cultural story of womanhood” (Brown 71-72). Examining one’s girlhood, in either youth or middle age, resists the security of convention to author a new kind of text. Brown expands, “A girl who chooses to authorize her life experiences . . . risks being, for a time, storyless. And to be without a story – to be without the conventional story of female becoming – can be a deeply frightening experience, since it is to be without a model, confronting the responsibility for authoring one’s life” (72). While these critics are using

narrativity merely as a motif for personal experience versus social discourse, I posit that the feminist authors in my project recognize an inherent textuality in girlhood as an unwritten experiential time.

Recently, scholars have developed an intense interdisciplinary focus on female adolescence,1 analyzing girls in fields where they were previously defined through boys’

1 The emergence of this literature toward the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries clearly marks a growing interest in girls across the disciplines through topics raised in a broad spectrum of texts including everything from girls’ self-worth and social position (e.g., Aapola; Barker; and Ensler), to relationships with popular 14 experience as the marker of normativity, through adult women’s experience as part of “the feminine,” or through children’s experience as genderless, inchoate subjects. The idea of adolescence as an independent life stage between childhood and adulthood came into being with the publication of G. Stanley Hall’s Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology,

Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (1904). Yet prior to the second half of the twentieth century, the importance of clinical and academic studies of girls and women had been ignored, trivialized, or marginalized.2 Furthermore, child and adolescent development theory in the U.S. had traditionally focused on the development of boys.3 Similarly, in the late

1970’s, studies of youth subcultures were booming, yet focused almost solely on males.4 During the 1980s, however, several groundbreaking girl-centered studies were published, though they prioritized understanding women more than girls.5 Following these in the 1990’s, several high- profile studies by scholarly organizations were published on girls’ lives.6 These studies showed a dramatic decline in girls’ self-esteem, body image, and academic performance at the stage of adolescence where they transition into the social position of young women as physiologically determined by a maturing sexual body. Responding to these studies and recent scholarship on culture (e.g., Inness; Gilbert; and Walkerdine), schooling and life chances (e.g., Jones; Moore; and Sewell), to sex trafficking (e.g., Crawford; Forsyth; and Simons).

2 See Brown and Gilligan; Gilligan; and Mazarella and Pecora.

3 Influential theories of child and adolescent development (Piaget; Kohlberg; Erikson) were grounded in studies of male youth but applied universally to boys and girls. Carol Gilligan, whose work demonstrates the role gender plays in children’s psychological development, critiques Piaget’s theories that “the child’ is assumed to be male” (18). 4 See Hebdige; and Willis. Noticing that girls were ignored in classic 1970’s subculture studies, feminist cultural studies scholar Angela McRobbie opened up new ways of thinking about studying “girl culture,” and is considered an originating theorist in Girls’ Studies. See McRobbie.

5 See Campbell; Fine; Griffin; Lees; and White.

6 See National Council for Research on Women for the Ms. Foundation, “Risk and Resiliency: Current Research on Adolescent Girls”; American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, “How Schools Shortchange Girls”; American Psychological Association, “Report of the APA Taskforce on the Sexualization of Girls”; National Council for Research on Women, and “Girls Report: What We Know & Need to Know About Growing Up Female.”

15 girls and women, scholars questioned how girls deal with the liminal status of the transitioning girl body and advent of the corresponding womanly social role, a process correlating to an

Althusserian hailing into a certain subject position versus a contrary interior process of individuation. Interdisciplinary scholars theorized a variety of different detrimental behavioral and emotional modes that girls adopt in this conflict, constituting what is now termed a “girl-in- crisis” discourse.7 Mary Pipher’s mainstream text, in particular, spawned a variety of derivative books8 creating what Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards termed a “veritable cottage industry” on girl’s failing self-esteem (179). This model received much critique from fellow scholars on whether it is useful or essentializing to speak of a suppressed “authentic voice” and

“real self” in contemporary girls,9 and whether conceptualizing girls as either panicked or defeated denies them individual strength, resistance, or alternatives. A second discourse in girlhood “crisis” soon emerged that explored girls’ aggression and violence in reaction to gender norms, rather than their vulnerability and acquiescence.10 However, through the late nineties and into the twenty-first century, scholars began emphasizing girls’ voices, strength, and empowerment as overlooked by “crisis” discourse, 11 with later texts considering the complicated interrelations of girls’ simultaneous power and disempowerment,12 and, finally, their unique

7 For foundational texts on girlhood “crisis,” which trace the trajectory of girls from being outspoken and assertive to disillusioned, silenced, self-doubting, vulnerable, preoccupied with appearance, and manifesting a greater need for approval from others, see Brumberg; Feldman; Gilligan; Mann; Orenstein; and Pipher.

8Some of the more obvious derivative texts use “Ophelia” in their title. See, for example, Dellasega; and Shandler.

9 Specific critiques of essentialism and biologism in theories on girls’ voice and selfhood are directed at Carol Gilligan’s early work in Girls’ Studies. See Kerber, et al.; Tronto; and Wilkinson, et al. 10 See Brown; Dellasega; Garbarino; Lamb; and Simmons.

11 See Carlip; Ensler; and Kindlon. It is important to note that research on girls’ power and expression is not necessarily equivalent to the “Girl Power” movement, which has its own history originating in girls’ underground ‘zines, the message of which was ultimately sanitized and co-opted by the media for commercial and consumer purposes.

12 See Aapola; Harris; and Lipkin. 16 positions in minority and global girlhoods.13

Today, Girls’ Studies is a new “field,” rather than simply studies of girls, constituting “a sub-genre of recent academic feminist scholarship that constructs girlhood as a separate, exceptional, and/or pivotal phase in female identity formation” (Wald 587). Girls’ Studies examines the adolescent girl’s different body, brain, and culture, as well as the social significations of the term “girl” as a fluid discursive construct within ideologies of girlhood.

According to the National Women’s Studies Association website, “Girls’ Studies is an emergent field that focuses on girls’ lives, interest, and culture—areas which have been under-researched and under-theorized, but which constitute a critical and exciting contribution to the future of

Women and Gender Studies.” In the past few years, there has been an explosion of academic publications related to girls and girlhood, an award-winning journal launched on girl research, an increasing number of conferences devoted to research on girls, and the creation of three new

Girls’ Studies undergraduate programs.14 “Girls Studies scholarship now exists across the world and across the academy,” summarizes Mary Kearney. Because Girls’ Studies is of particular interest to gender theorists, the National Women’s Studies Association founded a Girls’ Studies interest group, the Girls’ Studies and Activism Institute, and the Girls and Their Allies Caucus.

Girls’ Studies seeks to de-homogenize and de-essentialize the category of “the feminine” in order to recognize “girlhood” as a discursive identity category that generates particular personal,

13 See Bettie; Carroll; Helgren; and Keaton.

14 Mary Celeste Kearney notes the exponential growth in girl-centered publications: “[I]n the first five years of the twentieth century, academic presses virtually doubled the number of girl-specific monographs and anthologies that were published in the previous decade” (2). Girlhood Studies is winner of the 2009 Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers’ PROSE award for best new journal in the social sciences and humanities. Conferences on girls and girlhood include: “Alice in Wonderland” in the Netherlands, “A New Girl Order? Young Women and the Future of Feminist Inquiry” in Canada, “Girls Culture and Girls’ Studies: Surviving, Reviving, and Celebrating Girlhood in the U.S.,” “Reimagining Girlhood: Communities, Identities, and Self-Portrayals” at SUNY, and “After Girl Power: What’s Next?” at the University of York. Academic programs include the certificate program in Girls’ Studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the Girls’ Studies “track” at the University of Central Florida, and the Girls’ Studies minor at Appalachian State University. 17 social, and ideological experiences. Girls’ Studies therefore examines the social signification

“girl” across material bodies experiencing female adolescence as well as performing, expanding, and redefining “girlhood” across ages and cultures. Examining real and representational girls, girlhood, and girl culture within an approximate range of 8-18 years, Girls’ Studies prioritizes age as an axis of identity by focusing on pubescent, tween, and teenage periods.

Girls’ Studies particularly resists the definitional trajectory of “becoming” as the only way to conceive of girlhood. Catherine Driscoll notes that the way popular culture forms “talk about becoming a woman” imply that “girlhood is erased in becoming women” (77). The model of “becoming” is an “erasing transformation,” she writes, “a transformation from which there is no return and little reside” (77). Simone de Beauvoir classically stated that “To become a woman is to break with the past once and for all” (380). Using girlhood only to define womanhood ultimately negates what occurred in past adolescence and denies the psychological resonance of girlhood in adulthood. More importantly, “becoming” motifs occlude the possibility of an actualized girlhood by “eras[ing] the girl’s process toward identity and presum[ing] her unavoidable failure to obtain and secure subjectivity as a girl” (Driscoll 77, emphasis in orig.).

Therefore, “There has been significant movement away from studying girls as future women and toward analyzing girls as members of a unique demographic group” (Kearney 18). While Girls’

Studies resists defining the girl only as a future woman, it nonetheless critically engages girlhood as a liminal life phase. Because girlhood is a threshold life stage featuring physical/sexual development, “‘[g]irl’ is often used as a term of indeterminancy” through associations with development, ambiguity, and hybridity. Byers writes, “The term ‘girl,’ suggest[s] a delineated space prior to adult-womanhood,” prompting Girls’ Studies scholars to specifically examine “the historical and cultural contingency of girlhoods and their relationship to a sense of becoming or 18 incompleteness.” Simultaneously recognizing girlhood as its own identity category and as discursively and physically informed by “becoming,” Girls’ Studies and my project examine these trajectories in representations of the girl.

While the term “girl” in this project refers to literary representations of and interdisciplinary research on the girl across the teen years, this terminology in Girls’ Studies has a varied and evolving signification. Anita Harris notes its early raced and classed connotations, and the later proliferation of subcategories of “the girl”: “The category of ‘the girl’ has itself proved to be slippery and problematic. It has been shaped by norms about race, class and ability that have prioritized the white, middle class and non-disabled…. Even the issue of how a ‘girl’s is—previously a fairly simplistic categorization of females between the ages of approximately 12 to 20—has been complicated by both the ‘tweens’ phenomenon and the ‘Girlie’ movement”

(Harris xxii). Driscoll also validates adult women’s psychological connection to girlhood by noting her continuing self-identification as a “girl”: “In my mid-thirties I am not a girl any longer, in most senses of the word…. I’m still not sure when I stopped being a girl, if I did” (2).

Because the term “girl” has been used as a pejorative term to disempower adult women, “the problematic nature of ‘girling’ adult women—of diminishing women by refusing them full adult status” has obscured women’s positive and complex psychological connection to “the necessarily unfinished project of being a girl.” (Driscoll 36). My project engages the varied racial significations of “the girl” across transatlantic literature, and the psychological resonance of “the girl” through theories of the woman writer.

The Girl and Girlhood Sexuality in Feminist Theory

This dissertation reveals an epistemological tension regarding the place of the girl in feminist theory. I argue that this tension ultimately shapes narrative form in women’s literature. 19 By treating age as an axis of identity, Girls’ Studies is first recognized as an important contribution to feminist and gender theory. Psychologist Sheila Greene recommends age as an analytical category for diversifying feminist studies, stating that “feminists have become acutely aware in recent years of the dangers of generalizations about women and the need to take account of difference in relation to ethnicity, nationality, class, and sexuality. Age must be added to that list” (144). Woodward calls for integrating age as axis of identity within the curriculum:

“Along with race, gender and age are the most salient markers of social difference. Recent research in feminist cultural studies has been virtually dominated by studies of difference. We have invented courses in colleges and universities that study gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and class. But not age” (Woodward, qtd. in White x). Catherine Driscoll critiques the omission of girls from feminist identity debates, arguing that girlhood redirects fraught theoretical arguments about the construction or reality of the category “Woman” to the point of view of those approaching it: “The claim that there is an ‘essential difference’ between woman as representation (‘Woman’ as cultural image) and woman as experience (real women as agents of change) ignores how girls live and understand their lives in relation to such histories and images” (142). Overall, gender and feminist theory scholars originated Girls’ Studies and continue to dominate its scholarship.

Yet some feminist theorists are skeptical of recognizing girls in gender analysis because the topic of girls seemingly disrupts feminist discourses on maturity, autonomy, and individualism as defining the subject, and the validation of feminist consciousness through struggles, experience, and knowledge acquired in adulthood. Furthermore, feminists are skeptical of Girls’ Studies because of the ideological equation of women to children, and the question of whether the girl should be theorized as a sexed and gendered individual if her maturation is not 20 fully formed. If “feminism mostly aspires to that Subjectivity defined against immaturity and femininity,” then discounting girls could be seen as theoretically necessary for defining feminism

(Driscoll 130). Feminists distance themselves from stereotypes of ignorance, frivolity, ideological assimilation, and political disinterest associated with youth because “Woman is presumed to be the end point of a naturalized process of developing individual identity that relegates a vast range of roles, behaviors, or practices to its immature past” (Driscoll 130).

Paradoxes arise in feminist skepticism of Girls’ Studies when scholars are unwilling to treat girls’ rights and concerns as serious political causes based on the assumption that girls have not already treated their own rights and concerns as political causes. This perception of girls as anti- political about their own interests could be based on the assumption that girls are not overt or collective activists, suggesting that “Feminist subjects, in other words, ‘count’ as feminist in so far as they must fight for cultural intelligibility and political recognition”(Castaneda 30).

Teleologically, the linear tropes that constitute subjects within feminism paradoxically dislocate girlhood subjectivity. In discourses of development, Jennifer Eisenhauer notes, “The ‘girl’s’ position in feminist discourse is found within the contradiction that emerges between the ‘girl’s’ own subjectivity and the very displacement of her subjectivity in her role as ‘future’” (85).

Feminist subjectivity is often defined through the growing up, awakening, consciousness- raising, and teleology of the woman. Instead, the girl’s subject position remains on the side of that which can be overcome through progress or enlightenment as a transitional and unrealized time. The girl is understood as a place from which women come, an object of study, and a lifestage that we need to protect in order to protect future women, and the future of women. By examining the girl’s slippage in feminist discourses of identity-formation and empowerment, the disruptive potential of “[t]he hybridity, ambiguity, and contradictory characteristics of the ‘girl’ 21 as feminist subject critiques the woman as feminism’s subject” (Eisenhauer 80). Indeed, in

“Coalescing: The Development of Girls’ Studies,” Kearney comments that girlhood identity politics shift the paradigmatic model of feminist inquiry that Simone de Beauvoir expressed. She writes,

Feminist activists’ adult-centered perspective has had a noticeable impact on the

intellectual discourse that has emerged from [the women’s] movement.

[A]lthough Simone de Beauvoir’s most profound assertion—‘One is not born, but

rather becomes, a woman’—begins her exploration of how femininity is produced

during childhood, an analysis of how one becomes a girl is not her objective. Like

many feminist thinkers before and after her, Beauvoir studied female youth only

as it related to what she saw as her larger and more important project: the social

construction of women. (11, itals in orig)

Surveying “feminist scholars’ distantiation of girls” and “feminist researchers marginaliz[ation of] girls until recently,” Kearney highlights the epistemological tension between Girls’ Studies and how “an adult-centered perspective that marginalizes female youth is still evident among many women’s studies scholars” and “persists in the women’s movement” (5-6, 13). In this debate, a number of provocative questions arise: Are girls a women’s issue? Can girls be feminists? Does analysis of girls enhance or undermine studies of women, femininity, or sexuality?

One area where critics see this debate is in the division between Second and Third Wave feminisms. Third Wave feminism has concretized girls both as political subjects, who actively engage in and work towards furthering feminist goals in new formulations, and as the subject of

22 politics, who provide a critical frame for investigating feminine signification and power.15 The topics of youth, girls, and “girlie” culture are by no means the dominant or only difference between these two movements. But they are nonetheless one defining schema based on the study of female youth by the Third Wave, the dominance of youth and young adults within the Third

Wave, and the comparison of the Third Wave as generationally younger. For example,

Braithwaite notes the critical discourse that has developed as a way of explaining feminism’s history often describes it in generational terms: “The impulse to construct history in generational terms is evident in the recent debates taking place in feminism concerning the relation between second and third-wave feminisms. . . . While third-wave feminism signals its indebtedness to second-wave feminism, at the same time it often constructs itself in generational terms as the more progressive daughter of its second wave foremother.” White goes a step further and suggests that the female body encapsulates this division, critiquing the “reductive and essentializing strategy that collapsed the politics of the second wave into the bodies of second wave feminists. In contrast to this aging and decrepit body was the vigorous and rather youthful body [of] the New [Third Wave] Feminism.” White concludes by suggesting that age is a pejorative marker of difference within feminism, and “the idea of generational difference encourage[s] us to think about ageism embedded within feminism itself” (White and Bazin i).

Although classified as more “progressive” and “youthful,” Third Wave feminism’s focus on the micropolitics of everyday life and the recuperation of oppressive “feminine” topics has been critiqued by Second Wave feminism as anti-political, commercial, and trivial. Braithwaite summarizes dismissal of Third Wave feminism as “girly feminism,” “do me feminism,” and

“lipstick liberation”: “[M]any contemporary critiques of self-identified third wave feminism dismisses its feminism as such, maintaining that much of the feminism today, especially that of

15 See Baumgardner and Richards; Else-Mitchell; Sheridan-Rabideau; Siegal; and Walker. 23 younger women is somehow not ‘really’ feminist or not feminist ‘enough.’ Too much contemporary feminism . . . is really only part of the much touted backlash against feminism, ultimately only self-indulgent navel-gazing on reclaiming personal experiences and female pleasures, usually to the exclusion of any political understanding or activism” (Braithwaite 335-

36). However, Third Wave feminists argue that girls are politically active, both in the traditional definition of collectivist activism, and in the new sense of personal articulation, with research therein “illustrat[ing] girls’ centrality to major twentieth-century forces such as immigration, labour, feminism, consumerism, and civil rights [through][t]hemes including girls’ use of fashion and music, their roles as workers, their friendships, and new ideas about girls’ bodies.”

My dissertation uncovers ageism in feminist theories by revealing a latent textual

“anxiety” about girls’ cultural agency— articulated through the everyday choices and micropolitics of Third Wave feminism— in literature theorizing women’s cultural agency. While

I demonstrate, on the one hand, historical privileging of women at the relegation of girls in feminist literature, on the other hand, it demonstrates a simultaneous prioritization of girlhood creative agency in this literature. These authors’ simultaneous preoccupation with girls’ creative agency shows that feminisms dynamically coexist, contrast, and reinforce one another in ways that problematize a linear “wave” model of development. My project, therefore, argues for complicating the generational model of feminism, in alignment with Bazin’s argument for complicating the generational model of feminism. Bazin writes, “Locating feminism in this way becomes not simply a matter of contextualizing but rather a matter of identifying feminism’s histories as conflicted, contradictory, and complex. This is feminism that is fractured, divided against itself, troubled yet at the same time troubling; it is a feminism that is not unified but rather diverse and multiple” (Bazin 118). Rather than associating Third Wave feminism with 24 younger women and girls, and Second Wave feminism with older women and issues that have been moved beyond in Third Wave feminism, Bazin suggests that “One way of disrupting the generational model might be to return to the second wave’s attempts to understand feminist politics in relation to a materialist history” (116). I take this suggestion, specifically in Woolf and de Beauvoir’s texts, by examining the diversity of feminist politics within each as they negotiate a materialist history of the girl body.

Finally, this project shows that representations of girls’ embodied sexuality in feminist texts parallel debates in feminist theory on the inclusion or exclusion of Girls’ Studies in

Women’s Studies. Despite sexuality being a central topic in feminist studies, research on girlhood sexuality has only recently surfaced in this field. In response to B. Ruby Rich’s historical summary that when “looking back over the feminist sexuality debates of the [1980’s], it often seems that a crowd is gathered in one corner of a very large house, oblivious to the many places still unexplored” (558), sociologist Amy Schalet concludes “one largely unexplored room was that of female adolescent sexuality” (134). Some book-length studies emerged in the 1990’s and beyond that are “shining a light on that forgotten room of female adolescent sexuality”

(Schalet 134). My project recognizes a simultaneous interest and anxiety regarding girlhood sexuality in feminist literature.

Because the literature in this project foregrounds how sexuality and sex roles affect creativity, I focus on representations of girlhood sexuality. My project argues that constructing girls as psychosexually innocent or as hypersexualized within male heteronormative fantasies unfairly treats them as an adult site of nostalgia or desire, rather than acknowledging the complexities of girls’ sexual subjectivities. I draw from Girls’ Studies sociologist Deborah

Tolman’s premise that girls’ sexuality is a real, essential area of self-knowledge for girls; that 25 girls’ sexual self-knowledge informs their emotional, intellectual, and creative desires; and that studying girls’ discourses on their sexuality reveals complex social ideologies that challenge, reframe, and erase girls’ and women’s power. Tolman summarizes the principles of her study:

Girls live and grow up in bodies that are capable of strong feelings, bodies that are

connected to minds and hearts that hold meanings through which they make sense

of and perceive their bodies. Teenage girls’ sexual desire is important and life

sustaining; girls’ desire provides crucial information about the relational world in

which they live . . . . girls and women are entitled to have sexual subjectivity,

rather than simply to be sexual objects. (Dilemmas 19)

Katherine Dalsimer connects society’s denial of girls as autonomous sexual beings to a linguistic absence on girls’ sexual pleasure: “There is a rich vocabulary of slang available to describe boys’ masturbation. In contrast, not one colloquial expression exists in English to describe that of girls.

The disparity, I think, is astounding, and its implications far reaching” (37, itals in orig). She continues by noting that sexual development is described through language associated with boys:

“The very terms used to describe the onset of puberty—in both sexes—are metaphors rooted in the sexual experience of males. It is customary to speak of the ‘flood of impulses,’ the

‘maturational spurt,’ the ‘upsurge of drives.’ These metaphors fail to accommodate the girl’s very different experience of her emergent sexuality’ (37). This project argues that girls’ sexuality forms a culturally unintelligible, stylistically constructive space for women authors to explore sexual/textual politics. If “the process of girls’ bodies changing into women’s is an absolutely central anchor of female sexuality development,” literary representations of girls’ maturational bodies and sexuality offer salient psychosexual experiences that are imbricated in feminist theories on women’s artistry (Tolman “Different” 85). 26 The Girl and Sexual/Textual Politics in Feminist Literary Studies

This dissertation argues that feminist authors’ conceptions of the teen girl’s sexual body shape narrative form. Feminist scholars and literary critics have long written about the complicated relationships women have to authorship and embodiment, and its formal effects.

Toril Moi’s 1985 comprehensive study Sexual/Textual Politics outlined the relationships between the adult female body and creativity, arguing that the limitations of feminist theory derive from a weakening of critical discussion within the women’s movement. Largely reiterating this view, Moi’s 2008 article “‘I am Not a Woman Writer’: About Women, Literature, and Feminist Theory Today” asks why the question of the woman writer has disappeared from critical discussion in the 1990’s, arguing that we should reconsider women and writing today or risk “turn[ing] women into second-class citizens in the realm of literature” as “the archive of culture” (268). Linking feminist disinvestment in aesthetic questions of identity politics to poststructuralism, Moi suggests that “[i]nstead of supporting women interested in investigating women’s writing, our current theories appear to make them feel guilty, or – even worse – scare them away from working on women and writing altogether” (2008, 264). Yet Moi recognizes a still present concern for women’s authorship/authority and the desire to “create an intellectual space for discussion of [new women writers’] struggles” (263). While earlier studies acknowledged women’s bodies as influencing authorial aesthetics, I introduce the teen body to sexual/textual politics.

I argue that because the girl’s body is in the process of hormonal and sexual development, it is less formed and socially intelligible than the woman’s body, thus providing a dynamic narrative device for feminist authors’ systemic, theoretical questions on women’s fixed sex roles through an unwritten, micro-political space of artistic and sexual subjectivity. Girlhood 27 becomes a liminal space where the sexual body is first imbricated in feminine ideology and female artistry yet does not wholly signify either, operating partly outside such collective politics on women. Girlhood becomes a narrative mode to express female textuality and sexuality simultaneously, to self-authorize fraught creative desire that is taboo in women and denied in girls. As a result, girls engage with the choices they have available at the micro-level of everyday life through individual politics. In this literature, the girl’s growing body parallels her growing self-identity, a self-identity that these authors always connect to writing. In the context, the girl’s self-fashioning as a writer is as much a trope as the adolescent body.

For literary studies, this project argues that feminist authors use “the girl” as an anxious aesthetic strategy for portraying the teleology of the woman writer. Girlhood offers a way to recuperate the currently problematic critical frame of “women’s writing.” Theorizing women’s writing involves investigating the female body’s imbrication in textual forms that reflect the aesthetic negotiation of oppressive identity politics. H l ne Cixous famously argued in “The

Laugh of the Medusa” (1975) that, because women’s sexual pleasure has been repressed and denied expression based on a male/ phallogocentric model of sexuality, women have been forced to write and speak from a “masculine” position within the Symbolic order, thus requiring a movement of “ ’ e f m n ne.” In women’s writing, “Woman must write her self . . .

Woman must put herself into the text” (Cixous 1454) through “the inscription of the feminine body and female difference in language and text” (Showalter 249). Yet important contemporary diversification of the category Woman, including theories of gender construction and poststructuralism, have problematized this once finite category, despite new scholars’ continuing interest in understanding the woman writer’s positionality in textual form. “The girl” offers an analytic category that resists binaristic feminist discourses on essentialism vs. constructivism, 28 sex vs. gender, public vs. private, and authorial identity vs. death of the author by recognizing a liminal life timeframe of physical, sexual, and social identity formation.

After an analytic focus on girlhood as separate from womanhood, I am not simply re- absorbing the category “girls” into a justification for the category “women’s writing.” Instead, I am redefining “women’s writing” alongside scholars’ continued interest in the diversification of female identity by recognizing age, and specifically girlhood, as a various yet shared life stage by all women. Furthermore, I am expanding Girls’ Studies research to consider, as it once did, critical implications for women in girls’ research. Girls’ Studies scholars critiqued initial studies of girlhood where the aim was to reach conclusions about women. Instead, Girls’ Studies scholars pushed for research and results solely on girls. Today, this is the dominant approach.

However, I support reconciliation of the perceived hierarchical divide between studying girls and theorizing women. I argue that we should continue to treat girls and women as dialogic contexts yet, in doing so, prioritize girlhood while not denying that girlhood research impacts women.

Anita Harris outlines this epistemological shift in Girls’ Studies:

American girls’ studies were grounded initially in connections between girls’

development and women’s psychological and professional lives. By identifying

how issues in girls’ development persisted as problems in women’s adulthood, the

connections drawn between the two were inherently political. The

intergenerational discourse that defined the first wave of contemporary girls’

studies—one which drew a connection between experiences in girls’ psychosocial

development and persistent issues in adult women’s lives—is largely absent from

more recent work. . . . The movement of women on behalf of girls, initially losses

motivated by women’s recognition of the connections between their individual 29 and common political context, has given way to a field that tends to address girls’

concerns solely as concerns for and about girls. (20, 23)

My project seeks to recuperate Girls’ Studies “intergenerational discourse” in a way that does not subsume girls for conclusions about women and does not threaten “girlhood” as its own identity category. Harris and others argue that returning to intergenerational discourse strengthens feminist and collectivist efforts: “We are concerned that this absence represents a diminishment of the transformative potential of Girls’ Studies and the girls’ movement. . . . In our efforts to

‘save the selves of adolescent girls,’ we have lost sight of how these efforts were meant to save ourselves as well: how addressing girls’ needs also served explicitly feminist ends, as the literature defined work with girls as a form of collective resistance to patriarchy” (20, 23).

To offer background on the advent of “the girl” and Girls’ Studies in literary studies, I first note that early feminist literary scholarship treated girlhood only as an initiation period into womanhood or analyzed girls reflexively through their later adult characters.16 This is not to say that feminist scholarship had not examined girlhood, but that the trajectory of “becoming woman” was privileged over isolating experiences unique to girlhood. Also, the trajectory of

“becoming woman” was used to define “the woman” or “the artist” rather than “the girl.” Studies of Bildungsromanes and Kuntslerromanes treated girlhood as a transitional phase through a future-directed focus that seeks events or patterns of foreclosure on childhood to clarify adulthood, where the protagonist achieves subjectivity. The linear unfolding of time and movement through initiation rites emphasized the girl as process rather than product and girlhood as a perpetually transitory state of time rather than established duration of one form of subject. Marianne Hirsch defines the Bildungsroman through this trajectory as “tracing

16 See Hirsch and Abel; Hirsch; and Spacks. Notably, Sally Mitchell’s The New Girl defines girlhood not according to a particular chronological age, but as a “state of mind” ending when the girl is considered a sexual being capable of heterosexual consent (7). 30 development from childhood conflicts to (frequently imperfect) adult resolutions that provide some closure to the heroine’s apprenticeship. The progression toward closure may assume diverse forms” (11). One major female Bildungsroman paradigm involves a later-in-life epiphany that treats intellectual/emotional “awakenings” as a type of “deferred maturation” within “retrospective developmental tale(s) of maturation” (Hirsch 15). But this paradigm devalues physical development to favor emotional development, a move that marginalizes lived adolescence. The movement toward physical and psychic closure on girlhood that dominated studies of the Bildungsroman eased in the late 1980’s with Barbara White’s study, deemed the

“first book to be written on female adolescence in American literature.” Others at the end of the twentieth century also began to isolate girlhood patterns of experience, now in a variety of genres in addition to Bildungsromanes, such as young adult literature, juvenilia, girls’ literary paraphernalia, and commercial girls’ culture like “cheap and popular books and magazines”

(Mitchell 4).17

In “The Scholar Recalls the Child: The Difference Girlhood Studies Makes,” Megan

Sullivan argues that her initial literary critical readings were future-directed toward the adult woman and “neglected another avenue of study: the girl in the story” because she “understood the female child in [the novel] primarily as a narrative tool, or as a fictional device to get to the real point: the woman” (95, 98, emphasis in orig.). Sullivan argues that it was a mistake to “‘skip over’ the girl in order to get to the woman in the story” because this critical method resulted in one-sided readings where “the childhood scenes did not illuminate the life of the young female;

[instead] they only underscored the ideological distance the adult traveled” (97-98). Concluding that the girl’s “story is as important as is the narrative of the adult woman she will become,”

Sullivan notes that previously she “lacked the critical apparatus” to illuminate this subject

17 See Auchmuty; Dalsimer; and Saxton. 31 position (96, 98). Through Girls’ Studies, Sullivan sees new potential literary critical readings, suggesting how, “In a different reading— that is, in a reading informed by Girlhood Studies—

[she] might have examined . . . the life expectancy for girls . . . educational opportunities for female adolescents . . . and girls’ interpola[tion] into a class conscious society” (97).

Currently, there is a developing dialogue between literary studies and Girls’ Studies.

Kearney notes that literary studies is a key contributor to the field, explaining, “A considerable amount of girl-oriented research is related to literary studies, a field that has a lengthy history of both feminist scholarship and research specific to children’s literature” (17). Ruth Saxton female artistry and connects the initial interest in girlhood from the fields of psychology and sociology to spurring literary critical interest: “Concomitant to the increased interest in psychological and social development of girls, literary critics have begun to investigate the figure and figurations of the Girl” (xxiii caps in orig). Today, the primary forms of literature analyzed by girl-centered scholars include: “classic Bildungsromanes for adults with girl protagonists; girl-oriented young adult book series; girl-centered children’s literature and fairytales; girl character types; adult authors who focus on girl characters; girl’s writing; and girl readers” (Kearney 17-18). While my dissertation is a part of this new, growing scholarly body, the type of texts I have chosen and my methodology are considerably different. I am recuperating the girl in texts that privilege women

(excluding Sapphire), rather than engaging in the “dominant trajectory of literary studies focus[ed] primarily on narrative texts that privilege girl protagonists” (Kearney 18). This project is not organized around one uniform genre such as the Bildungsroman, but is structured around a question in gender theory. Furthermore, most scholars do not connect interdisciplinary Girls’

Studies research to their literary critical readings. Of the few that do, interdisciplinary research

32 consists of passing references,18 rather than a critical frame for each individual chapter.

Chapter Outline

Chapter One, “Girls’ Studies and Third Wave Feminism in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of

One’s Own and The Waves,” argues that Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and The Waves present girls as the figurative paradigm of artistic creative conflict in the woman writer’s formation, aligning Woolf’s representations of girls’ artistic/erotic expressions with Girls’

Studies sociological research on real girls’ articulations of their sexual bodies and sexual self- consciousness. Woolf’s stylistic pattern of using the term “women” when theorizing the state of female authorship, but “girls” when fictionalizing scenes of this authorship has gone previously unrecognized in scholarship. Woolf fictionalizes “the girl” in intimate scenes of solitude and daily activity, while theorizing “women writers” through objective references on shared history and stasis, a dualism that utilizes two political modes on individual versus collective feminist politics. Using these rhetorical shifts to query aged identity in A Room of Ones Own, I recuperate the allegorical “Judith Shakespeare” as a girl figure, and link moments in her allegory to interdisciplinary research on real girls. More comprehensively, I compare Woolf’s repeated m se-en-s ene of a “girl with a pen” with phenomenological research that reports girls both experience and censor their physical desire, creating a contrary sexual self-consciousness which they link to larger conceptualizations of selfhood, agency, and power of expression.

Chapter Two, “Othering the Girl: Agency, Madness, and Puberty in Simone de

Beauvoir’s The Second Sex,” argues that Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex defines girlhood through narrative fixation and psychosexual “madness” as a motif for Othering the girl from feminist consciousness, thus symbolizing a hidden authorial anxiety about the girl’s potential that I challenge with Girls’ Studies empirical literature on real girls’ textual products as

18 See Eisenhauer; and Nashell. 33 expressions of agency. Although Beauvoir is famous for theorizing that Woman is man’s Other, I show that Beauvoir others the girl in figuring women’s position. The Second Sex denies the girl full subjectivity, sexual embodiment, and feminist identity, yet requires her for the developmental model of each. Beauvoir positions girls below women in a hierarchical relationship where the girl stands for all characteristics associated with the limitation of the female gender as a state to overcome. I argue that madness is Beauvoir’s principle motif for both defining and othering the girl. Through mental disability rhetoric and institutionalization imagery, Beauvoir portrays the girl’s maturational body, social liminality, and narrative modes as “driving her mad.” To validate this narrativity, I pair Beauvoir’s excerpts from real girls’ writings in The Second Sex with Girls’ Studies scholarship on girls’ written forms as resistant practices to hegemonic gendered scripts that dictate sex roles and sexual silencing. Research on teen girls’ textual products including diaries, letters, poetry, and juvenilia as sites of self- exploration, cultural engagement, and resistance, challenge Beauvoir’s classifications of girls’ textuality as apolitical, narcissistic, ineffective, and “demoniac.”

Chapter Three, “Celie’s Psychodrama: Neuroscience, Teenage Cognition, and the

Epistolary Form in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple,” argues that the sisters in Alice Walker’s

The Color Purple enact a narrative “psychodrama” that represents a single artistic psyche split by sexual trauma into different aspects of developmental girlhood that I parallel to new neuroscientific studies on teenage cognition. I argue that Celie and Nettie’s written letters demonstrate a psyche split into static and dynamic selves including the self which experienced, and the self which escaped, sexual violation in girlhood. Although not actual artists, Celie and

Nettie figure two aspects of one artistic imaginary whose written letters enact opposing aesthetic and thematic modes, modes that correspond to neuroscientific research. Recent studies show that 34 teenagers’ brains have difficulty with “executive functions” which include projecting goals, predicting causation, cognitive flexibility, abstract thinking, selecting sensory information, and recalling memory. Furthermore, studies researching executive brain functions specifically in youth who experienced familial sexual and physical abuse show that these normal teenage impairments are intensified. As a girl, Celie demonstrates problems in every one of these executive function categories. Conversely, Nettie demonstrates higher-order, “adult” brain functioning. Although Walker’s black “womanism” opposes “girlishness,” her novel foregrounds girlhood psychosexual development to represent different aesthetic orders in a single artist’s formation that correspond to new aged cognitive modes in neuroscience.

Chapter Four, “Girlhood Biopolitics in Sapphire’s Push: Obesity, Sexual Arousal, and

HIV Infection,” uses Girls’ Studies biological research on African American girls’ earlier menstruation, increasing HIV infection, and arousal during sexual abuse to argue that Precious’s complex biopolitical embodiment in Sapphire’s Push shifts feminist politics on the incest story to recognize girlhood sexual embodiment and psychosexuality. Precious acquires knowledge of her HIV/AIDS with her ABC’s, making Precious’s trauma writing express new biopolitics in the teen girl body. Furthermore, Precious self-consciously reflects on the act of writing and on herself as a writer/“poet,” offering a confident character voice who combats intersectional injustices through written and spoken assertions of her age, girlhood, and girl sexuality. Yet

Precious’s physical states cause slippage in her social signification as a teen girl, suggesting a new kind of female embodiment that is culturally invisible, thereby highlighting age as intersecting racial invisibility. Precious writes, speaks, and feels her girlhood psychosexual subjectivity thereby offering an outspoken, proactive, sexually-aware, socially-critical, and situationally analytical characterization that represents new twentieth-century feminist politics. 35 Chapter One: Girls’ Studies and Third-Wave Feminism in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and The Waves

But my “book” [A Room of One’s Own] isn’t a book it’s only talks to girls, lectures I gave last autumn, and not for the adult. Virginia Woolf, Letter to Ethel Sands, (Letters, Vol. 4, 102)

Although Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is a foundational feminist tract for theorizing women’s social and artistic roles, it relies on stories, metaphors, and rhetorics of girlhood. Referring to girls numerous times in her text, Woolf describes Judith Shakespeare as “a highly gifted girl” (49), Mary Carmichael as “an unknown girl writing” (94), Dorothy Osbourne as an “untaught and solitary girl” (62), and even her famous taxicab scene of a couple as “the girl and the young man” (96). Her fictional persona in “Professions for Women” is repeatedly “a girl in a bedroom with a pen” (58, 61). Yet, most feminist interpretations—of Woolf in particular and of feminism more generally—use “woman,” not “girl,” as the term of analysis. What can we learn by investigating the different significations of “girl” and “woman” in Woolf’s treatise on the female writer?

Woolf uses the term “women” when theorizing the state of female authorship, but “girls” when fictionalizing scenes of this authorship, a stylistic pattern unrecognized by Woolf studies and contemporary epistemologies that theorize youth.19 Specifically, Woolf’s instances of girls highlight their own narrative framing to dramatize artistic consciousness in depictions of

19 Rather than using the words “girl” and “woman” interchangeably, Woolf seems to distinguish between groups. She uses “women” in theoretical discourse of women’s history, artistry, and social position; “young women” and “ladies” in reference to her original collegiate audience; and “girl” throughout fictionalized instances of women writing. Girls’ Studies, Third Wave Feminist, and Woolf scholars have not paid attention to Woolf’s mentions of girls or to her rhetorical slippage, other than noting her idealization of youth for the condition of writing. For example, Bette London critiques Woolf for creating an image of the female writer that “desires to be young, gifted, and male” (19). Across her fiction, scholars have also highlighted Woolf’s representations of early childhood as a location for the power of the visionary imagination such that “Woolf saw in the preverbal, unspoken, or not yet sayable insights of childhood the most intense experience and expression of life” (Goodenough 188). Thus, much scholarship exists on how adult characters “attempt to recover the original wholeness of inward visions Woolf saw in the child’s spontaneous apprehension” and how child characters show affinities to artists (Goodenough 188).

36 psychosexual struggle in the immediate act of creativity. The girl’s dominance in narrative scenes, and repeated depiction in the act of writing, implies proximity of girlhood to authorship; yet authorship is theorized only through woman. Woolf’s delineation of girls should be valuable especially to Girls’ Studies, a growing interdisciplinary field that seeks to de-homogenize and de-essentialize the category of “the feminine” in order to recognize girlhood as a discursive identity category that generates particular personal, social, and ideological experiences. Girls’

Studies therefore examines the social signification of the girl across bodies experiencing female adolescence, as well as performing, expanding, and redefining girlhood across ages and cultures.

Furthermore, third-wave feminism has recently concretized girls both as political subjects who actively engage in and work toward furthering feminist goals in new formulations, and as the subject of politics who provide a critical frame for investigating feminine signification and power.3

While Girls’ Studies primarily ranges from pre- to post-puberty and ending with legal adulthood, I treat the term “girl” in Woolf as referencing the mid-teens, because this is the age group she explicitly notes in Room (22, 47-48) and explicitly foregrounds—with attention to the central teen age of 15—in discussions of rooms in “A Sketch of the Past” (122-25). Furthermore, because I am engaging literary analysis of fictional representation, I treat the girl not only as a lived subjectivity, but as an aesthetic construct and artistic preoccupation. Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship in Girls’ Studies, I will explore Woolf’s three allegories—on her bedroom, the fisherman, and Judith Shakespeare—as well as her metonym on the artistic imagination to ask: What does Woolf’s rhetorical slippage mean? Is there a subtext in her mentions of girls? And how do girls relate to her concepts of creativity? Furthermore, because feminist criticism has principally treated the girl as indistinguishable from woman, and girlhood 37 only as an initiation period into womanhood, my critical focus on Woolf’s mentions of girls raises provocative disciplinary questions, such as: Are girls a women’s issue? Can girls be feminists? Does the analysis of girls enhance or undermine studies of women, femininity, or sexuality?

Through a third-wave Girls’ Studies perspective, I argue that Woolf imbricates girlhood in her artistic imaginary, revealing her unconscious engagement with female adolescence against her more totalizing impulse to argue for a definitive “woman genius.” Fictionalizing the girl in intimate scenes of solitude and activity, while theorizing women writers through objective references on shared history and stasis, Woolf enacts two political modes on individual versus collective politics—a distinction debated today between, among many others, second- and third- wave feminisms.20 When theorizing women’s authorship as a platform that reveals systemic female subordination, Woolf narrows to private, everyday scenes of girlhood actions, considerations, and resistances. Her rhetorical and imagistic movement reveals a political negotiation between those identities she sees both inside and outside as fixed, ideological constructs of woman, and between the strengths and limitations of the individually forming psychosexual self.

Woolf treats girlhood as a liminal space whereby one initially negotiates adult hegemonic femininity and personally negotiates puberty’s sexual and creative desires. Using girls as a narrative apparatus to theorize women’s authorship, Woolf presents girls as the figurative paradigm of artistic creative conflict in the woman writer’s formation by situating girlhood as the key site for female sexual/textual politics.21 Sexuality and textuality are linked for her, as in her

20 See Baumgardner and Richards; Else-Mitchell; Sheridan-Rabideau; Siegal; and Walker.

21 I am referring to Toril Moi’s 1985 comprehensive study Sexual/Textual Politics, which outlines the relationships between the adult female body and creativity, and argues that the limitations of feminist theory derive from a 38 famous dictum from Room: “The book has somehow to be adapted to the body” (78). Because the girl’s body is in the process of hormonal and sexual development, it is less formed and socially intelligible than the woman’s body, thus providing a dynamic narrative trope for

Woolf’s systemic, theoretical questions on women’s fixed sex roles through an unwritten, micro- political space of artistic and sexual subjectivity.

To introduce Girls’ Studies epistemology that treats girlhood as its own identity category,

I begin by turning briefly to “A Sketch of the Past” where, in recalling the bedroom of her youth,

Woolf demarcates teenage subjectivity as “a different substance” through an acute emphasis on

“minds and bodies at fifteen” (124). She defines her bedroom through girlhood psychological and bodily parameters, figuring girlhood sexual abuse and mental/emotional trauma through a psychosexual “room” allegory. Secondly, I parallel Girls’ Studies sociological research on real girls’ articulations of their sexuality and of their sexual bodies as a troubled “discourse of desire” with Woolf’s famous fishing allegory in “Professions for Women.”22 I argue that Woolf’s

weakening of critical discussion within the women’s movement. Largely reiterating this view, Moi’s 2008 article “‘I am Not a Woman Writer’: About Women, Literature, and Feminist Theory Today” asks why the question of the woman writer has disappeared from critical discussion in the 1990’s, arguing that we should reconsider women and writing today or risk “turn[ing] women into second-class citizens in the realm of literature” as “the archive of culture” (268). Linking feminist disinvestment in aesthetic questions of identity politics to poststructuralism, Moi suggests that “[i]nstead of supporting women interested in investigating women’s writing, our current theories appear to make them feel guilty, or – even worse – scare them away from working on women and writing altogether” (264). Yet Moi recognizes a still present concern for women’s authorship/authority and the desire to “create an intellectual space for discussion of [new women writers’] struggles” (263). On-going interest in, yet critique of, women’s authorship as a viable category results in “a kind of intellectual schizophrenia, in which one half of the brain continues to read women writers while the other continues to think that the author is dead, and that the very word ‘woman’ is theoretically dodgy” (Moi 2008, 264). If the question of how, or whether, to investigate the importance of the author’s gender and sex “remains just as unresolved as it was twenty years ago” such that “theory and practice appear to be just as out of synch as they were by the end of the 1980s,” I suggest using “the girl” as a point of entry into new investigations of theories of aesthetic form, authorship, and feminism (Moi 262, 264).

22 Focusing on girls’ recognition, meaning, and experience of embodied desire, scholars conducted qualitative phenomenological interviews with girls which revealed conflictive stories that both acknowledge a range of passionate physical feelings while simultaneously reflect the limited and oppressive ways these feelings are treated by culture. These discourses of desire therefore mark what Deborah Tolman terms a “dilemma of desire” for girls that, she suggests, is reflected within their experience of sensation itself. She writes, “it is crucial to understand that 39 representation of the fishing girl aligns with findings in social science on girls’ sexual self- consciousness. Girls’ Studies research reveals that girls’ sexual self-consciousness is linked to their larger conceptualizations of selfhood, agency, and power of expression. Such a connection forces us to consider remembrance of the girl’s body as shaping textuality, as well as informing conceptions of the woman’s body. Thirdly, I apply a range of Girls’ Studies research from neurology, psychology, biology, sociology, and critical theory to A Room of One’s Own, revealing girl characters within identities that are critically treated as adult women. Specifically,

I recuperate the allegorical Judith Shakespeare as a girl figure, and link moments in her representation to research on real adolescent girls’ neurological development, psychological crises, loss of voice, social critique and resistance, eating disorders, teen pregnancy, and global disenfranchisement and disappearance. Finally, to highlight how girlhood sexual/textual politics and Woolf’s rhetoric of the girl reappear in her fiction and in a novelistic girl character, I analyze

Rhoda in The Waves. In The Waves, Woolf fragments the woman writer’s psyche into six segments as a metonym for imagination where, I argue, Rhoda represents an amplified site of the female unconscious and creative struggle. I focus both on Rhoda’s girlhood, where she experiences paradoxically climactic and conflictive relations to the act of writing and to sexual/aesthetic pleasure, and on Rhoda’s adulthood, where she remains a perpetual girl figure whose girlhood identity resurfaces palimpsestically as a life stage to impinge on, and ultimately overshadow, her adult life.

While it may seem like a leap to take American studies of late-twentieth-century girls and compare them to Woolf’s early-twentieth-century British writings, even in her rendering of sixteenth-century girlhood with Judith Shakespeare, it is striking how closely these findings their desire feels like dilemma as a direct result of social constructions of gendered sexuality” (Tolman 199 [emphasis in text]). See also Brown; Martin; Tolman; and Ussher.

40 correspond to Woolf. I am being deliberately provocative in my use of the term “girl” by blurring studies of real girls and representations of fictionalized girls, and by blurring geographical and historical girlhoods. My intention is not to disregard the unique contexts for each set of references or to ignore that girlhood is a culturally constructed and fluid concept.

Rather than suggesting that there is a transhistorical essential girl, I am interested in how these psychological and literary similarities across almost a full century and two countries undercut readers’ critical distance when reading A Room of One’s Own—a critical distance I am attempting to further bridge by introducing third-wave feminism into the text. Given the successive women’s movements since the book’s publication, the situation of women writers today is clearly far different from Woolf’s time, and traditional feminism implies it must therefore be different for girls. Yet, Woolf could easily be describing an array of contemporary girls outlined through Girls’ Studies in her seemingly dated allegorical figures, such that, as

Woolf laments in Room, “[s]o accurately does history repeat itself” (54).

For feminist theory, reading Woolf through a Girls’ Studies lens reveals second- and third-wave feminist discourses and debates in her work as individual and collective politics, therefore suggesting that Room is both an originary text for feminist criticism and an evolutionary text for new feminisms and gender foci. For literary studies, Girls’ Studies helps to bring into visibility a productive tension in Woolf’s work between different stylistic forms, and between girlhood creativity and women’s authorship. Finally, for Girls’ Studies, Woolf treats the idea of girlhood as a distinct analytic category in her fiction and the girl as a subject that is not just a transition to womanhood, thus offering a longer trajectory for Girls’ Studies scholarship than is currently perceived and legitimizing the focus on girls as political inquiry. Because her allegories of creativity repeatedly centralize the figure of the girl, I argue that Woolf foregrounds 41 the idea of girlhood in the idea of authorship, revealing her need to imagine a girl in order to make a space for the woman writer.

“Minds and Bodies at Fifteen”: Girls’ Studies, Subjectivity Debates in Feminist Studies, and “A Sketch of the Past”

Representations of girls and girlhood sexuality in Woolf enact contemporary debates within third wave feminism regarding the inclusion or exclusion of Girls’ Studies in Women’s

Studies. Recently, scholars have developed an intense interdisciplinary focus on female adolescence.23 Girls’ Studies gives girlhood its own identity category as a separate stage in the human life cycle, one possessing its own identity issues predicated on the adolescent girl’s different body, brain, and culture, as well as on the different social signification, discursivity, and cultural ideology of the category “girl.” By looking at girlhood as an object of study in itself and girls as a unique demographic group, the field moves beyond the traditional notion of female adolescence as “becoming” another and toward an understanding of girlhood as a distinct form of subjectivity. By treating age as an axis of identity, Girls’ Studies is being recognized as an important contribution to feminist and gender theory. Yet, some feminist theorists are skeptical of recognizing girls in gender analysis, because the topic of girls seemingly disrupts feminist discourses on maturity, autonomy, and individualism as defining the subject, and the validation of feminist consciousness through struggles, experience, and knowledge acquired in adulthood.

Furthermore, feminists are skeptical of Girls’ Studies because of the ideological equation of women to children and the question of whether the girl should be theorized as a sexed and gendered individual if her maturation is not fully formed. If feminism is defined against

23 Rather than simply studies of girls, this “field” is “a sub-genre of recent academic feminist scholarship that constructs girlhood as a separate, exceptional, and/or pivotal phase in female identity formation” (Wald 1998, 587). For recent books that trace the field’s development, see Aapola, Gonick, and Harris; Harris; and Lipkin.

42 immaturity, ignorance, triviality, ideological assimilation, and political disinterest associated with youth, then discounting girls could be seen as theoretically necessary for defining feminism.

Also, paradoxes arise in feminist skepticism of Girls’ Studies when scholars are unwilling to treat girlhood as a serious feminist cause based on the assumption that girls have not already treated themselves as a feminist cause. Teleologically, the linear tropes that constitute subjects within feminism dislocate girlhood subjectivity. Feminism is constituted as the growing up, becoming, awakening, and teleology of the woman, while the girl’s subject position remains on the side of that which can be overcome through progress or enlightenment as a transitional and unrealized state until the moment of recognition as a woman. The girl is understood as a place from which women come, an object of study, and a moment that we need to protect in order to protect future women, as well as the future of women. Therefore the liminality, hybridity, and contradictions inherent in the girl as feminist subject can critique the woman as feminism’s subject.

While Woolf continues to be a site of theoretical and methodological struggles over the direction of feminism and feminist possibilities, my own appropriation of Woolf to illuminate a particular epistemological field does not mean that the reading itself resolves all conflicts.

Rather, I am looking at the suggestive potential of Woolf’s rhetoric to ask, following Ellen

Rosenman: “Given the language of her period, what shapes could Woolf’s critique of patriarchy take? What alternative meanings could she assign to the word ‘woman,’ or what grammar and syntax could express new modes of thought and action?” (636). My project, borrowing Bette

London’s framing, “has its own more modest dimensions: to bring out one Woolf insufficiently recognized in critical discussions” and work towards revealing “this more unfamiliar figure”

(25). 43 In response to B. Ruby Rich’s historical summary of the feminist sexuality debates of the

1980s, that when looking back over such debates “it often seems that a crowd is gathered in one corner of a very large house, oblivious to the many places still unexplored” (558), sociologist

Amy Schalet concludes that “one largely unexplored room was that of female adolescent sexuality” (134). Some book-length studies emerged in the 1990s and 2000s that are “shining a light on that forgotten room of female adolescent sexuality” to find for girls a physical and emotional “desire of their own” (Martin 122). While none of these Girls’ Studies scholars explore or directly reference Woolf, I see girl sexuality as a central creative concept in A Room of One’s Own, “Professions for Women,” and The Waves. Using the motif of a room to constitute an unexplored analytical space, these scholars reflect Woolf’s argument for the material conditions necessary in artistry, for a literal room for rumination, as engendering a psychological space for creative thinking and analysis.

Turning briefly to “A Sketch of the Past,” I wish to highlight that Woolf defines her teenage bedroom through psychological and bodily parameters that she deems unique to age 15.

Woolf describes a “mind stuff and being stuff” (124) that she reiterates—eight times in only four pages—is particular to age 15: “she at eighteen, I at fifteen”; “some life for a girl of fifteen”;

“whether fifteen or not”; “I had that room, when I was fifteen”; “if it is a good thing to be aware of all this at fifteen”; “Thoby was seventeen, two years older than I”; “at thirteen one could not master it . . . but two years later”; “minds and bodies at fifteen” (122–25). Parallels between

Woolf’s feelings of conflicted connection to this girlhood room and her larger motif of women’s entrance into the artistic realm as figured through “a room of one’s own” are noteworthy, suggesting a psychoanalytic subplot to Room that demonstrates returns of a repressed girlhood.

Reflecting on the loss of her mother, the onset of “the voices,” and the repeated sexual 44 abuse she experienced at home, Woolf writes that “[i]f that room . . . could bring out its ghosts . .

. perhaps one of them would say what an odd, what an unwholesome life for a girl of fifteen. I suppose that, if one of them had read To the Lighthouse, or A Room of One’s Own, or The

Common Reader, he or she might say: ‘This room explains a great deal’” (123–24). This room

“explains” a developmental state of consciousness and embodiment for mid-pubescent girlhood subjectivity. Differentiating this age from that of 13, when “one could not master [my mother’s death],” Woolf outlines age 15 as “a different substance; a mind stuff and being stuff that was extraordinarily unprotected, unformed, unshielded, apprehensive, receptive, anticipatory” (124).

She generalizes this age of susceptible consciousness and body to all teenagers, declaring: “That must always hold good of minds and bodies at fifteen” (124). Isolating age 15 as uniquely experienced and felt, Woolf continues by self-identifying during her mid-to-late teens as a “girl,” a classification she also applies “to any girl of sixteen or eighteen” (147). Notably, she calls herself a girl in “Sketch” often in proximity to describing her Hyde Park Gate (HPG) bedroom.

For example, Woolf frames her girlhood identity within references to her room: “When he came into my room at HPG . . . I was a year and a half younger; and a girl. A shell-less little creature, I think he thought me; so sheltered, in my room” (146). The vulnerable “mind stuff and being stuff” of girls at age 15 sets the theoretical scene for Room, as Woolf surmises in “Sketch” how

“[s]ociety in those days was a perfectly competent, perfectly complacent, ruthless machine. A girl had no chance against its fangs. No other desires—say to paint, or to write—could be taken seriously” (157).

The Woman Writer and the “Girl in a Bedroom with a Pen”: Authorial Identity in Feminist Literary Studies and “Professions for Women”

In “Professions for Women,” the girl dominates fictionalized instances of the scene of writing, whereas the woman challenges narrativity. This rhetorical movement creates a succinct 45 pattern I see expanded throughout Room, and it shifts Woolf’s political registers between individual and collective politics. Asked to address the social platform of “the employment of women,” she moves out of the static, collective category of “woman” as a theoretical front into an animate narrative of everyday girlhood’s contemplative struggle. These shifts in macro- and micro-representation suggest third-wave feminist politics in Woolf’s portrayal of the girl.

Woolf opens with a collective historical account of women’s literary achievement by emphasizing the “many . . . women” who have come before her to make progress easier for her generation: “For the road was cut many years ago—by Fanny Burney, by Aphra Behn, by

Harriet Martineau, by Jane Austen, by George Eliot—many famous women, and many more unknown and forgotten, have been before me, making the path smooth, and regulating my steps”

(57). Although likewise labeling herself a woman, stating as categorical fact that “[i]t is true I am a woman,” Woolf reflexively constructs herself as a girl writer in her subsequent narrative of individual experience (57). She moves abruptly from the topic of women’s economics to the story of a girl: “The cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in the other professions. But to tell you my story—it is a simple one. You have only got to figure to yourselves a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand” (58). This location of the girl in a distinctly narrative frame recurs when Woolf moves from theorizing the best environment for the novelist to again inviting the reader to

“figure” or “imagine” a narrative sequence: “I suspect that this state is the same both for men and women. Be that as it may, I want you to imagine me writing a novel in a state of trance. I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot. The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman” (61). 46 The girl is both fictionalized and constructed in the scene of writing, more specifically in the scene of contemplating while writing a novel. By contrast, Woolf breaks from the storyline only when referring to the totalizing concept of “the woman writer”: “Now came the experience, the experience that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl’s fingers” (61). Woolf overdetermines the girl’s representation in her fishing allegory, as we are called to “imagine a novelist’s state of mind” through the “image” that portrays “imagination” in the “figure” of “this girl [who] is the image,” only breaking from narrativity with an objective reference to the state of women writers. Revisiting this scene in

Room, Woolf allegorizes the girl as “Thought,” referring to the figure who “let its line down into the stream” (5).

Similarly in Room, Woolf repeats her semi-autobiographical mise-en-scène of a lone “girl with a pen” when imagining Mary Carmichael. She writes: “Considering that Mary Carmichael was no genius, but an unknown girl writing her first novel in a bed-sitting-room, without enough of those desirable things, time, money, and idleness, she did not do so badly, I thought” (94).

Woolf again invites the reader to imagine the act of composition for Dorothy Osbourne, moving from inanimate, periodic scenarios of when “woman might write” to extended prose describing the activity of a girl “framing” and “fashioning” a “running” monologue: “A woman might write letters while she was sitting by her father’s sick-bed. She could write them by the fire whilst the men talked without disturbing them. The strange thing is, I thought, turning over the pages of

Dorothy’s letters, what a gift that untaught and solitary girl had for the framing of a sentence, for the fashioning of a scene. Listen to her running on” (62). Woolf approaches the narrative by rhetorically switching the subject from woman to girl for outlining Osbourne’s epistolary excerpt of her “reading and working” (62). Woolf follows Osbourne’s excerpt by remarking that the 47 girl’s skill suggests an emerging artist: “One could have sworn that she had the makings of a writer in her” (63). Yet, Woolf slips back into references to women when theorizing the female’s limiting social climate, concluding that “[b]ut . . . one can measure the opposition that was in the air to a woman writing” (63). She frames the girl within artistically stultifying references to

“woman.” Throughout “Professions,” the girl writer is disturbed by ominous conceptions of woman, because “the phantom was a woman” who reminds her, “[M]y dear, you are a young woman” and leaves her in the quandary “that the young woman had only to be herself. Ah, but what is ‘herself’? I mean, what is a woman?” (58-60). Room’s concluding pages also stress the conflict of this discursive category, as Woolf laments, “Women—but are you not sick to death of the word? I can assure you that I am” (111).

In sum, Woolf reflexively constructs herself and several women authors as girls in fictionalized instances of the scene of writing. Woolf shifts back and forth between writing girl and woman specifically at points of discussing authorship and sexual signification, categories that are only fully intelligible in adults, yet develop in adolescence nonetheless. I want to suggest that Woolf imagines girlhood as a liminal space whereby one initially negotiates adult hegemonic femininity—rhetorically woman. Portraying how the girl’s active negotiation of identity requires an examination of the available discourses on femininity, Woolf shows that girls engage with the choices they have available at the micro-level of everyday life through individual politics. Girlhood becomes a space where the sexual body is first imbricated in female artistry and feminine ideology, yet does not wholly signify either, operating partly outside such collective politics about women. Therefore girlhood is an unintelligible and unwritten personal space of artistic and sexual development for negotiating the fixed, encroaching label “woman,” because “long before a girl reaches adulthood she hears both directly and indirectly the 48 established story of the good woman” (Brown 81). Thus, Woolf centralizes the girl’s negotiation of “Woman[hood]” as a key dynamic in textual production. Girls’ Studies scholars Lyn Mikel

Brown and Nancy K. Miller classify the candid expression of the intellectual and embodied experiences of girlhood as unwritten “narratives.” As Brown explains:

[F]or a girl at the edge of adolescence to tell the truth about her life [would be] “to

protest against the available fiction of female becoming” [Miller 129, qtd. in

Brown]. A girl who chooses to authorize her life experiences . . . risks being, for a

time, storyless. And to be without a story—to be without the conventional story of

female becoming . . . is to be without a model and thus potentially to be on one’s

own, confronting the responsibility for authoring one’s life. (71–72)

While these critics are using narrativity merely as a motif, I posit that Woolf recognizes an inherent textuality in girlhood as an unwritten experiential time. For Woolf, girlhood becomes a narrative mode to express female textuality and sexuality simultaneously, to self-authorize fraught creative desire that is taboo in women and denied in girls. For her, the girl is a mode of resistance through self-authorship, wherein she fictionalizes allegories of authors—portrayed as girls—that are all self-referential (the Marys in Room form a composite Woolf). In sum, the memory of girlhood psychosexual experience surfaces palimpsestically in Woolf’s primary narrative on the erasure of women’s writing within the master narrative of male authorship.

Because Woolf uses the girl as an aesthetic strategy for representing the teleology of the woman writer, I argue that girlhood offers a way to recuperate the currently problematic and vanishing critical frame of “women’s writing” as its own literary category. Theorizing women’s writing involves investigating the female body’s imbrication in textual forms that reflect the aesthetic negotiation of oppressive identity politics. Hélène Cixous famously argued that because 49 women’s sexual pleasure has been repressed and denied expression based on a male/phallocentric model of sexuality, women have been forced to write and speak from a

“masculine” position within the symbolic order, thus requiring a reactionary movement of

“ ’ e f m n ne,” or women’s writing. In women’s writing, “[w]oman must write her self . . .

Woman must put herself into the text” through the inscription of the feminine body and female difference in language and text (1454). Yet, important contemporary diversification of the category “woman,” including theories of gender construction and poststructuralism, have problematized this once-finite category, despite new scholars’ continuing interest in understanding the woman writer’s positionality through form. While previous studies only acknowledged women’s bodies as influencing authorial aesthetics, I ask how memory of the teen pubescent body in the process of hormonal and sexual development surfaces in sexual/textual politics.

The Woman Writer and the Girl-Fishing Allegory: Girlhood Sexuality in Girls’ Studies Phenomenology and “Professions for Women”

Referring to herself four times as “the girl” in her fishing allegory in “Professions for

Women” (61-62), Woolf portrays the intrusion of compulsory heterosexuality on girlhood sexual self-consciousness as limiting the freedom of the girl’s coming-into-being as a sexual and artistic subject. I draw from Girls’ Studies sociologist Deborah Tolman’s premise that girls’ sexuality is an actual, essential area of self-knowledge for girls; that girls’ sexual self-knowledge informs their emotional, intellectual, and spiritual desires; and that studying girls’ discourses on their sexuality reveals complex social ideologies that challenge, reframe, and erase girls’ and women’s power. Tolman summarizes the principles of her study:

Girls live and grow up in bodies that are capable of strong feelings, bodies that are

connected to minds and hearts that hold meanings through which they make sense 50 of and perceive their bodies. Teenage girls’ sexual desire is important and life

sustaining; girls’ desire provides crucial information about the relational world in

which they live . . . girls and women are entitled to have sexual subjectivity,

rather than simply to be sexual objects. (19)

Woolf portrays the interrelation of these contexts in her fishing allegory of girlhood artistic/erotic expression. Feminine ideology interrupts “the power of the erotic,” to use Audre

Lorde’s term, precluding the fishing girl’s connection to her inner source of pleasure, creativity, and self-affirmation. The girl’s metaphysical link to her body is wrecked, symbolizing the occlusion of the writer’s creative processes. Ideological pressure for females to deny and resist their desires results in both the girl’s unwritten experience of “something about the body, about

[its] passions,” as well as the girl’s dissolution after the fictionalized frame (Woolf 61). I will parallel Woolf’s allegory with psychosocial research into girls’ “discourses of desire” that reports that girls can and do speak of their own desire as part of their sexuality, but that their response to these feelings simultaneously reflects social censure to be a normal, appropriate good girl who does not possess sexual feelings. This paradox creates a dilemma of desire for adolescent females, a “dilemma which is securely located in compulsory heterosexuality”

(Brown 151). Girls remain “caught in the contradiction between the reality of their sexual feelings in their bodies and the absence of their sexual feelings in the cultural script for adolescent girls” (Tolman 333).

Woolf eroticizes the metaphysical in a scene that opens with a depiction of a writer’s free and unbounded exploration of the creative unconscious. Woolf conflates a “girl sitting with a pen in her hand . . . [which] she never dips into the inkpot” with a fisherman maintaining a suggestive “rod held out over the water”: 51 The image that comes to my mind when I sit and think of this girl is the image of

a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out

over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every

rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious

being. Now came the experience, the experience that I believe to be far commoner

with women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl’s fingers. Her

imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places

where the largest fish slumber. (61)

A tone of suspension and immobility conceals an active, uncensored creative journey as “she was letting her imagination sweep unchecked . . . in the depths of [her] unconscious being.” The fishing line connecting body to mind “raced through the girl’s fingers,” building the excited momentum as “her imagination had rushed away” to the culturally unintelligible spaces of adolescent female sexuality, “the pools, the depths, the dark places.” Yet, the girl’s intensity of

“experience, the experience” ends within a condition specific to “women writers,” because

“women writers are impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex … which condemns freedom in women,” Woolf theorizes once the narrative concludes (63). She thus figures the gendered parameters of hegemonic femininity as a spatial barrier that the girl’s “imagination . . . smash[ed] . . . [and] dashed itself against” (61). A dangerous sexual climax suggests the entry of what Adrienne Rich calls “compulsory heterosexuality.” Woolf writes:

And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and

confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl

was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and

difficult distress. To speak without figure she had thought of something, 52 something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a

woman to say. (61)

Sexual subjectivity and agency in female adolescence are culturally unintelligible, as in the conceptually obscure repetition that “she had thought of something, something about the body.”

In the allegory, when the girl’s creative erotic consciousness ends, “[s]he could write no more.

The trance was over. Her imagination could work no longer” (62). The girl’s connection to her inner source of pleasure, creativity, and self-affirmation ends with heteronormative censure of

“the passions it was unfitting for her to say,” thus precluding her artistic/erotic consciousness.

Woolf’s likening of sexual and artistic sensitivities parallels sociologist Karen Martin’s argument that attaining sexual subjectivity and attaining nonsexual agency, such as the ability to create art, are intimately linked for girls. She writes that “[s]exual subjectivity is an important component of agency, feeling like one can do and act. This feeling [agency] is necessary for a positive sense of self. . . . That is, one’s sexuality affects his/her ability to act in the world and to feel like she/he can will things and make them happen” (10). Woolf’s girl lacks what Martin terms “subjective body knowledge,” an internal and emotionally connected physical awareness, which reflects Martin’s findings from interviews with fifty-five middle- and working-class teenagers that “almost every aspect of puberty is a source of anxiety for girls” (15). A similar occlusion recurs in “A Sketch of the Past” when Woolf describes fluctuations between connection and disconnection with the world, between “separate moments of being and nonbeing,” such that “a great part of every day is not lived consciously” (70). She associated this

“disembodied trance-like intense rapture that used to seize me as a girl” with an erect penis, following this descriptor by noting how memory of this girlhood state of consciousness can

“return with a violence that lays me low” (319; emphasis added). 53 Woolf’s simultaneous tones of pleasure and peril reflect Tolman’s “common threads of fear and joy, pleasure and danger [that] weave through girls’ narratives about sexual desire in

[her] study” (340). Drawing from Carol Vance’s characterization of female sexuality in a patriarchal society as a doubled reality of pleasure and danger, Tolman’s qualitative phenomenological study of 15- to 18-year-old girls’ experiences of sexual desire revealed a pattern of girls sacrificing desire to keep themselves safe. Girls give up or interrupt a range of erotic desires to keep themselves safe from physical, economic, or social consequences in “trying to embody the desexualized ‘good girl’” (328). One 17-year-old subject loved to dance, but no longer engaged in its pleasures because of its slippage into sexual arousal—a state that, when dancing with boys, she feared might preclude her ability to keep boys’ advances in check

(Tolman 71-72). Furthermore, Tolman finds that lesbian and bisexual girls in particular

“disassociated from desire,” and “[m]ore often, they speak of the danger of speaking about desire at all” (339).

Woolf likewise thematizes girls’ and women’s silencing in the allegory’s rhetoric of speech: “To speak without figure, she had thought of something . . . that was unfitting for a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked. The consciousness of what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions” (61-62). By personifying her “reason” as addressing the theories of her embodiment, Woolf separates the two, reflecting what Tolman and Szalacha found in studies of suburban girls who experienced sexual abuse as “an out-of-sync relationship between their bodies and their selves” (31). Tolman and Szalacha remark of one girl that “her mind and her body sound like separate entities,” a condition they call “silent bodies”

(31). Woolf biographer Roger Poole describes “a disassociation in Virginia’s sense of her own body” (112) as her emotional response to girlhood incestuous abuse, a separation that Louise A. 54 DeSalvo traces through Woolf’s letters, with particular attention to what she deems a textually critical year for Woolf, in her chapter “1897: Virginia Woolf at Fifteen” (209-32). Tolman and

Szalacha furthermore explain that girls who had experienced sexual violence “reflect the idea of desire and pleasure more than or as often as the actual embodied experience of it” (31). Woolf theorizes that the idea of desire is something she has yet to solve: “telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved” (62).

In A W e ’s D a y, Woolf’s entry one day before giving a collegiate speech asserts that she will use the speech as a framing concept for a new book “about the sexual life of women”: “I have this moment, while having my bath, conceived of an entirely new book—a sequel to A

Room of One’s Own—about the sexual life of women: to be called Professions for Women perhaps—Lord how exciting!” (165-66). If the “process of girls’ bodies changing into women’s is an absolutely central anchor of female sexuality development” (Tolman 85), representations of girl sexuality in Woolf are imbricated in her theories on women’s artistry because “the experiencing body is central to Woolf’s conceptions both of art and of life. Woolf thinks of self and self-representation as grounded in the body . . . recovering and writing about one’s self is conditional on recovering and writing about sensory experience” (Koppen 379).

Judith Shakespeare in the Twenty-first Century: Salient Girlhoods in Interdisciplinary Girls’ Studies and A Room of One’s Own

The paradigmatic story of Judith Shakespeare in A Room of One’s Own encapsulates

Woolf’s theories on the loss of the woman artist to patriarchal ideology, the resulting dearth of literature by women, and the silencing of women’s experience. Yet, Judith’s tragedy is dominated by her representation as a teenage girl, and the locating of her poetic spirit in girlhood as extinguished by the advent of womanhood. In this short allegory, Woolf repeatedly emphasizes Judith’s youth, writing that “she was very young,” even when “[a]t last” the actor- 55 manager beds her (48). Being “not seventeen” when she flees home to pursue acting “before she was out of her teens,” Judith was “a highly gifted girl” who flounders in her artistic ambitions

(47-49). Driven by the impetus of youth, she suffers for her artistic aspiration first at home, where Woolf devotes the most textual space to portraying Judith as a girl through her relations as a growing daughter. Woolf explains how “[n]o girl could have” walked the streets alone, given the expectation of “chastity” until marriage (49). When Woolf considers “who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body,” she demarcates Judith’s poetic—girl—spirit from her reproductive—woman’s—body, thus making an implicit statement about age, as well as an explicit one about gender (48).

The duration of Judith’s girlhood grounds the narrative’s entire trajectory. Likewise,

Woolf frames the narrative within the context of female youth. Reflection on marital age catalyzes Judith’s story when Woolf reads that females “were married whether they liked it or not before they were out of the nursery, at fifteen or sixteen very likely. It would have been extremely odd, even upon this showing, had one of them suddenly written the plays of

Shakespeare, I concluded” (46). After the close of Judith’s story, Woolf reflects on how “the writer . . . suffers, especially in the creative years of youth, every distraction and discouragement” (52). Both public opinion and male scholarly research tout feminine inadequacies, such that “[e]ven if her father did not read out loud these opinions, any girl could read them for herself; and the reading, even in the nineteenth century, must have lowered her vitality, and told profoundly upon her work” (54). Because forces stultify “any girl[’s] . . . work,”

Woolf emphasizes the premature end to females’ artistry and lives by asking, “How could

[Judith] help but die young, cramped and thwarted?” and by concluding that “[s]he died young— alas, she never wrote a word” (70, 113). Despite Judith’s clear identification as a teenage girl 56 experiencing a youthful creative energy and capacity, she is used to theorize the woman artist, as

Woolf contemplates “[t]hat woman, then, who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century, was an unhappy woman, a woman at strife against herself” (50-51). How does Woolf’s story change when we think of Judith as a girl subject and age as an identity constituent? To echo

Nancy Gutierrez’s query, which she posits in a pedagogical study: “What kind of Judith

Shakespeare can we imagine?” (424).

In a fascinating transhistorical correspondence, Judith Shakespeare’s depiction aligns with recent studies on girlhood. A major focus in Girls’ Studies has been on this stage of adolescence where girls’ transition into the social position of young women as physiologically determined by a maturing sexual body. Because studies show a dramatic decline in girls’ self- esteem, body image, and academic performance at this stage of adolescence,24 scholars have theorized a variety of different detrimental behavioral and emotional modes that girls adopt in this conflict, constituting what is now termed a “girl-in-crisis discourse.”25 Mary Pipher’s

Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls locates the crisis of divided consciousness—Woolf’s “woman at strife against herself”—distinctly in late adolescence. Pipher argues that girls experience a psychological upheaval when confronted with the limiting constructs of adult femininity, adopting a socially acceptable “false self” and marginalizing,

24 For major studies conducted by scholarly associations on the “crisis” of girlhood confidence and advancement, see reports by: the National Council for Research on Women for the Ms. Foundation, “Risk and Resiliency: Current Research on Adolescent Girls,” American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, “How Schools Shortchange Girls,” American Psychological Association, “Report of the APA Taskforce on the Sexualization of Girls,” and National Council for Research on Women, “Girls Report: What We Know & Need to Know About Growing Up Female.”

25 For foundational texts on girlhood “crisis,” which trace the trajectory of girls from being outspoken and assertive to disillusioned, silenced, self-doubting, vulnerable, preoccupied with appearance, and needing more approval from others, see Brumberg; Feldman; Gilligan; Mann; Orenstein; and Pipher. Pipher’s mainstream text, in particular, spawned a variety of derivative books using “Ophelia” in their title, creating what Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards term a “veritable cottage industry” on girl’s failing self-esteem (179). A second, later discourse in girlhood “crisis” explores girls’ reactionary aggression and violence, rather than their vulnerability and acquiescence. See Brown; Dellasega; Garbarino; Lamb; and Simmons. 57 losing, or figuratively killing their “authentic self” (10). Carol Gilligan argues that loss of voice characterizes female adolescence, as girls lose confidence in what they have previously held as true and begin to waffle between self-assurance and self-doubt, which materializes in a silencing akin to how Judith “never wrote a word” (113). Woolf’s portraying how Judith’s “genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly” (48), her rhetoric of sexuality and satiety, chastity and starvation might suggest the psychology of the onset of eating disorders as it occurs and is studied predominantly in female youth.26

Judith’s absconding from the father’s domicile reads as the youthful act of running away from home and coincides with neurological studies on teenagers’ lack of “executive functioning,” which point to impulsivity and inability to project into the long term.27 “New imaging studies are revealing—for the first time—patterns of brain development that extend into the teenage years,” neuroscientist Daniel Weinberger, Brita Elvevåg, and Jay N. Giedd explain:

Remarkable changes occur in the brain during the second decade of life. Contrary

to long-held ideas that the brain was mostly grown-up—“fully cooked” by the end

of childhood—it is now clear that adolescence is a time of profound brain growth

and change. In fact, the brain of an early adolescent in comparison to that of a late

adolescent differs measurably in anatomy, biochemistry, and physiology. . . .

[T]eenagers are not the same as adults in a variety of key areas [involving

executive functions]. Such limitations reflect, in part, the fact that key areas of the

adolescent brain . . . are not fully mature until the third decade of life. (1, 3)

26 While recent studies point to an increase in eating disorders in boys and prepubescent girls, most critical work still highlights teen girls as the predominant group suffering from anorexia and bulimia. For some current book-length works by scholars, activists, and recoverers (Morgan Menzie, in particular, was a teen girl author), see Brumberg; Halse; Hornbacher; Martin; and Menzie.

27 See Bradley; Strauch; and Walsh. 58 Because this neurological expansion and restructuring is different from both childhood and adulthood, it suggests a significant developmental girlhood. Notably, myelination, a process of coating axons that allows nerve impulses to travel faster, occurs earlier in teen girls than teen boys, prompting Francine Benes to remark that this difference is significant enough to suggest gender behavioral differences and “could be part of the teenage gender puzzle” on why girls seem to attain intellectual, contextual maturity before boys (Benes, qtd. in Strauch 54). Judith’s astute secrecy about her writings conveys such early intelligence when “she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them” (Woolf 47).

In a biological rather than neurological context, Judith’s suicide conforms to data that the teenage years are the most susceptible timeframe for terminal self-harm, based on this age group’s hormonally fatalistic and deterministic tendencies.28

The girl-in-crisis model has received much critique from fellow girls’ studies scholars on whether it is useful or essentializing to speak of a suppressed “authentic voice” and “real self” in contemporary girls,29 and whether conceptualizing girls as either panicked or defeated denies them individual strength and resistance.30 Girls’ Studies theorists interested in girlhood agency and ownership can point to Judith’s systematic exit from the home and her persistent pursuit of her acting dream as bold, empowered “events where girls rupture or deterritorialize normative discourses on femininity . . . thus contributing to a growing theoretically informed empirical literature on girls’ subversive and resistant practices to hegemonic gendered and sexed scripts”

28 See Beauchaine; and Rutter.

29 Specific critiques of essentialism and biologism in theories on girls’ voice and selfhood are directed at Carol Gilligan’s early work in Girls’ Studies. See Kerber, and others; Tronto; Wilkinson, and others.

30 For texts emphasizing girls’ voices, strength, and empowerment as overlooked by “crisis” discourse, see Carlip; Ensler; Harris; and Kindlon. It is important to note that research on girls’ power and expression is not necessarily equivalent to the “Girl Power” movement, which has its own history originating in girls’ underground ‘zines, the message of which was ultimately sanitized and co-opted by the media for commercial and consumerist purposes.

59 (Renold and Ringrose 320). Judith rejects the heterosexual matrix’s roles of dutiful daughter and prospective bride, while resisting her reinsertion into this matrix through her unwillingness to take up home and maternity, even if resistance means death.

In asking what kind of Judith Shakespeare we can imagine, Girls’ Studies revisions the woman genius as a portrait of teen pregnancy. Teenage pregnancy constitutes an important body of social research on girls that redefines experiences we traditionally liken to adulthood as also occurring in girlhood.31 Recognizing that Judith is a pregnant teen offers the potential for new feminist analyses on reproductive ideologies—ideologies that currently pathologize and racialize underage mothers, while ignoring the unique intersection of the social world of girls and the social stigma of pregnancy.32

The family’s privileging of the brother’s education over the sister’s is key to Judith’s representation, and one of the aspects of her characterization granted the most textual space:

She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But

she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let

alone reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her

brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her

to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and

papers. (47)

31 For example, sociologist Anne Murcott suggests that teen girls occupy a liminal conceptual space that accounts for oversights, and stigmas, in social constructions of pregnancy. She writes in her essay’s subsection “Girls In Trouble” that “in a sense, teenage pregnancy constitutes a problem precisely because it expresses an ambiguity not catered for in the sharp conceptual contrast [between adulthood and childhood]. It is a contradiction in terms [because] [c]hild and adult are mutually exclusively conceptualized. It is impossible simultaneously to be adult and child. What is more, it is adults who bear and beget children; a child cannot beget or bear a child. Yet that is precisely what a pregnant teenager is about to do” (7). Judith Musick’s Young, Poor, and Pregnant offers a unique scholarly study that interjects pregnant teens’ diary entries in analyses of environmental and psychological pressures on girls, thus contributing to Girls’ Studies theoretical methodology that treats girls not simply as passive objects of inquiry but as active subjects in meaning-making. Musick is director of one of the nation’s largest and most successful programs for teenage mothers, The Ounce of Prevention Fund in Chicago, Illinois.

32 See Barker; Bettie; and Luttrell. 60 Hardly an outdated representation, denial of primary and secondary education for girls is a contemporary global reality, such that “60% of the children out of school today are girls” (World

Bank). While it is ironically Judith’s upper-class status that necessitates her preparation for marriage as apart from education, rather than her family’s or community’s poverty, the denial of her education speaks to a historically resonant issue that is, foremost, a girls’ issue and one that implicates economics then and today. The chief economist of the World Bank argues that

“Educating girls yields a higher rate of return than any other investment in the developing world,” with the Secretary General of the United Nations echoing how “study after study has taught us that there is no tool for development more effective than the education of girls”

(UNICEF). Yet a volatile attitude towards girls’ education, reflected in Judith’s parents’ censure and Woolf’s own aborted schooling, persists nonetheless as obstacles to girls and even to the field of Girls’ Studies. Jackie Kirk, co-founder and co-editor of the only Girls’ Studies scholarly journal, Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, was killed in an attack in Afghanistan in a car ambush as she was returning from a site where she was helping set up schools for girls. As one of the world’s few experts on education for girls in conflict and post-conflict situations,

Kirk’s murder occurred just as the inaugural issue of the journal was to go to press. Nicholas D.

Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn address the denial of education, medical care, and even life to girls in their book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.

Concerned principally with gender-based sexual violence, enslavement, and murder as part of a global “gendercide” of girls and women, they write that “more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the battles of the twentieth century” (xvii). Although Judith Shakespeare’s allegory is certainly not one of murder, it is one of multivalenced disappearance—disappearance from home, from society, and from the 61 canon of literature. Judith’s “anonymity” is her primary trait, her body itself remaining ambiguously “buried at some cross-roads” (Woolf 50, 48). Kristof and WuDunn write of girls’ inevitable flight, theft, or death in a climate of gender exploitation, such that “every year, another

2 million girls worldwide disappear because of gender discrimination,” resulting in how “107 million females are missing from the globe today” (xv). On the Heal Africa/Half the Sky Book

Club website, journalist Tom Brokaw describes Kristof and WuDunn’s Half the Sky philanthropic organization established from their research as a “plea to all of us to rise up and say ‘No more!’ to the 17th-century abuses to girls and women in the 21st-century world.”

The Girl as Author, Sun, and Persistent Psychology in The Waves

I turn now to The Waves, critically received as Woolf’s most experimental novel, to highlight how rhetoric of the girl and girlhood sexual/textual politics reappear in Woolf’s fiction and in a fictional girl character. In The Waves, Woolf fragments the woman writer’s psyche into six segments as a metonym for imagination. The novel is narrated by six characters from childhood to adulthood who demonstrate different gender-inflected relations to the creative imagination and who collectively comprise one consciousness as the “lady writing.” Woolf describes The Waves as “my first work in my own style!” where her aim was not “to tell a story” but rather to portray “a mind thinking” (Writer’s 142-43, 176). Extending Woolf’s argument about women’s marginalized status from the arts, the three female characters in The Waves have a performative and symbolic rather than literal relation to writing, thus exhibiting different aspects of creativity but not operating as poets, writers, or readers, roles the three male characters engage or seek to engage. The characters’ lives portray how their original psychic harmony falls into discord, fragmenting both among themselves and individually as they age into social and sexual roles. Despite this trajectory into stable and particularized subject positions, it is Rhoda 62 who maintains an ambiguous relation to sexuality, femininity, action, embodiment, and language. Although each character represents a dynamic of the creative unconscious, I argue that

Rhoda’s “intense abstraction” from the corporeal into the temporal, from the prosaic into the lyric, from realism into mysticism, from acceptable female sex role into unintelligible sexuality, and from plotline action into referential presence positions her as an amplified site of the female unconscious and creative struggle (Waves 315). Rhoda thus appears as the figure of the female neurotic, her role predictably ending in suicide and suggesting a neurotic ‘madness’ as tropic of female creative discord. Yet this struggle originates in Rhoda’s girlhood, where she experiences paradoxically climactic and conflictive relations to the act of writing and to sexual/aesthetic pleasure. Thus, I look at Rhoda both as a girl to concretize sexual/textual politics as central to girlhood, and as a perpetual girl figure as one whose girlhood identity remains within a palimpsest of Rhoda’s life stages to resurface, impinge on, and ultimately overshadow, her adult life. Rhoda resists a discernable social role as ‘Woman’, instead operating in a representationally liminal subject position that cannot reconcile her girlhood fragmentation. As such, the representational and figurative girl enables Woolf’s metaphorics of the imaginary. These metaphorics first prioritize the girl through the prologues’ rhetoric.

The Waves repeats Woolf’s rhetoric of the girl in the book’s italicized opening prologues, and concludes the final prologue with reference to girls. Following the synechdoche of an “arm of a woman rais[ing] a lamp” in its opening, the prologues refer to a girl three times

(179). The girl is the only repeated instance of a complete human figure specifically, the only human mentioned at all in the prologues other than one simile of the waves “like turbaned men” within overall atmospheric description of the sun’s stages (227). The story of the sun’s stages from dawn to dawn, concurrent with the story of the characters’ aging, uses the sun as symbolic 63 of human consciousness which, in the beginning, has not risen. As the sun rises, sunlight both aesthetically illuminates the landscape but also makes objects appear more distinct and separate, thus highlighting the beauty but also the boundaries and distance between objects. Likewise, as the characters’ self-consciousness increases, the origin of the imaginary psychically separates and people begin to see themselves as detached and distinct. The process of psychic separation leads to darkness and termination, both of the sun’s cycle and of the physical body. Because the prologues portray the development of human consciousness through natural and atmospheric imagery, any human figure is both conspicuous and symbolic. The opening prologue abstracts this human presence by referring to “a woman” through simile and synechodoche. The “sky cleared” and the sun begins its assent “as f he a m of a woman o hed benea h he ho zon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow, spread across the sky like blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher . . . Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and

hen h ghe n a b oad band of gh be ame v s b e” (179). While the woman brings forth the day’s light with her powerful arm carrying the luminous sun, her indirect reference and this solitary mention diffuses her overall presence in the prologues. Instead, generative creativity rests in the more direct power of “the girl,” who symbolizes that sun. Read biblically, Woolf feminizes Genesis, substituting God as mankind’s unknowable Maker with the arm of a woman that brings the Son/sun in the form of a girl.

The third prologue introduces “The girl” who symbolizes the sun before it reaches absolute height; the stage of the sun’s late adolescence, if you will (225). The girl enters as a motif for the sun when the sun’s effect becomes paradoxical in that it both “made” the bright colors of the landscape yet simultaneously shadows them in “darkness.” Woolf parallels “The sun” and “The girl” in the prologue’s opening: 64 The sun rose. Bars of yellow and green fell on the shore gilding the ribs of the

eaten-out boat and making the sea-holly and its mailed leaves gleam blue as steel.

Light almost pierced the thin swift as they raced fan-shaped over the beach.

The girl who had shaken her head and made all the jewels, the topaz, the

aquamarine, the water-colored jewels with sparks of fire in them dance, now

bared her brows and with wide-opened eyes drove a straight pathway over the

waves. (225)

The girl’s presence is more complete than the woman’s, as a figure “who” acts with “her” head and facial features. The girl affects since she “made,” “drove,” “bared,” and had “shaken” the elements into existence as the sun that lights them. Although she causes “sparks of fire in them

[to] dance,” the girl’s gaze likewise differentiates and shadows the elements as her bright optical forging of a “straight pathway over the waves” reveals how“[ ]he q ve ng ma ke e spa k ng was da kened” and that “ he g een ho ows deepened and da kened” (225). The girl’s introduction of light coupled with shadow, of beauty and ephemeracy, is reinforced by the birds because “[f]ear was in their song, and apprehension of pain, and joy to snatched away quickly now at this instant” (225). Furthermore, sunbeams conveying both lightness and darkness introduce the first suggestion of fragmented symbiosis when the birds “now together, as if conscious of companionship” are also “now alone as if to the pale blue sky” (225). Themes of simultaneous pleasure and pain, fragmenting symbiosis, and emphasis on the face will recur in

Rhoda who, I later explore, originates conflict in aesthetic pleasure, resists interpersonal fragmentation, and repeatedly laments that she “has no face” (197, 203, 259, 265, 319). Such parallels will position Rhoda as a double for the girl in the prologue; Rhoda is the girl estranged from the shock of sensation, while the prologue’s girl generates the shock of sensation. In sum, 65 the girl represents the onset of psychic disintegration from psychic wholeness by symbolizing the sun’s outlining and distinguishing of objects. Whereas the prologue preceding the girl demonstrates how “[e]verything became softly amorphous” as a unified “concussion” (194), the prologue introducing the girl shows simultaneous lightness and darkness as the visionary mind becomes “intensely conscious of one thing, one object in particular” which is, ultimately, oneself

(226).

The same symbolic girl resurfaces in the fifth prologue to convey her partial withdrawal now that the sun’s intermediate stage has passed and total differentiation ensues which “gave to everything its exact measure”: “The sun had risen to its full height. It was no longer seen and half guessed at, from hints and gleams, as if a girl couched on her sea mattress tired, her brows with water-globed jewels that sent lances of opal-tinted light falling and flashing in the uncertain air like the flanks of a dolphin leaping, or the flash of a fallen blade” (278). The girl whose once active gaze “sent lances of opal-tinted light falling and flashing” as glimpses of beam and shadow, now retires as a “girl couched on her sea-mattress tired.” The previous prologue imagistically positioned the sun in the girl’s place: “The sun, risen, had no longer couched on a green mattress darting a fitful glance through watery jewels, bared its face and looked straight over the waves” (250). The sun is not “as if” a girl, or introduced as a girl, in this prologue but instead the two are conflated. No other human figures appear in the prologues at any point until their close, when mortal “girls” conclude the natural imagery when they are enveloped in darkness: “Mounting higher, darkness blew along the bare upland slopes, and met . . . the valleys full of running streams and yellow vine leaves, and girls, sitting on the verandahs, look[ing] up at the snow, shading their faces with their fans. Them, too, darkness covered” (341). Now that the sun has set, so too is the symbolic girl absent, and darkness envelopes the land, signifying the 66 death of human consciousness. Woolf literalizes the once mystical girl into mortal girls who, rather than affecting time’s passage with their gaze, shield and “shad[e] their faces with their fans.” Yet even “[t]hem, too, darkness covered,” Woolf emphasizes in her closing. Such a transition from the symbolic into the literal reinforces the death of the imaginary, a death which

Rhoda enacts by her suicide in the corresponding, final prologue’s chapter. Woolf figures the sun’s transitional rise to absolute height as a girl, portraying the first instances of symbiotic fragmentation and aesthetic conflict under her guise. The girl thus occupies a pivotal role in

Woolf’s theory of artistic and subjective conflict during the passage of time.

In the beginning of The Waves, Rhoda is a girl in early childhood who struggles with the immediate act of writing. Although she is younger than the teenage figures and allusions that

I’ve looked at thus far in Woolf, I want to demonstrate how writing is immediately foregrounded in Rhoda’s identity, and how conflicts originating therein recur in her later girlhood through the frame of sexual/aesthetic pleasure, when she defines herself as a “girl.” Among the initial unified harmony between the children and their sensory environment, Rhoda is differentiated by her rumination on and conflict with writing because “Louis writes; Susan writes; Neville writes;

Jinny writes; even Bernard has now begun to write. But I cannot write” (189). Rhoda’s conflict with writing is metaphorically written by the “lady in the garden” who “sits between the two long windows, writing” (186). Notably not termed a “woman,” as if existing outside those ideological limitations as a young woman free from social constraint, this “lady” grants order and meaning to the surroundings in which Rhoda exists, acting as the self that both eludes and inspires Rhoda. Rhoda represents the feminine lyric voice through her alliterative observations and poetic monologues, a form that the novel privileges over the masculine prosaic. Yet her struggles with recording language, with literalizing the creative unconscious, simultaneously 67 portray her as a silenced female artist, thus aligning her with the imaginary moreso than the other metonymic characters.

The scene of Rhoda’s struggle with writing focuses on her conflict with signification where she queries writing as a fixed sign system. As the teacher writes a problem on the board for the students to answer, Rhoda laments the lack of meaning: “the terror is beginning. . . . I see only figures. The others are handing in their answers, one by one. But I have no answer. . . . I am left alone to find an answer. The figures mean nothing now. Meaning has gone” (189).

Beginning to write, Rhoda’s indoctrination into the linguistic realm paradoxically casts her outside of it: “I begin to draw a figure and the world is looped in it, and I myself am outside the loop, which I now join–so–and seal up, and make entire. The world is entire, and I am outside of it, crying, ‘Oh, save me, from being blown forever outside the loop of time!’” (189). The girl’s writing shows her conceptualizing the world and time’s passing, thus symbolizing the origin of the imaginary. Yet when distinguishing the world by closing its imagistic loop, the girl is separated from herself, as if the writer, by her own hand, is forced out of her creation.

Recalling the “nervous thrill” of reading this scene as a girl herself, in “‘The Shock of

Sensation’: On Reading The Waves as a Girl in India, and a Woman in America,” Meena

Alexander questions why the “girlchild is cast out”: “Why should the writing child be flung outside the loop of time? Why should her hand tremble with fear as she writes? And how did she so painfully, so carefully acquire the discipline that turned her into the woman in the garden, writing?” (234-35). Rather than classifying Rhoda’s crisis with writing as the girl’s separation from the textual, Alexander argues that the girl’s creativity generates the “lady’s” authorship.

She likens this symbolic relationship between these “two figures, each no more than an outline” to a mother-daughter union: “The child is the mother of the woman. I am only learning this now. 68 What the child draws into the quick of her flesh is what the writing woman must etch into the lineaments of her landscape, her characters of knowledge, her tall green trees” (235). The girl operates as the lady’s imaginary; their parallel scenes of writing locate creative invention and discord in the girl, and creative output in the lady. This motif repeats those in Room and

“Professions,” where the girl is portrayed struggling in the act of writing, and the woman, or

“lady,” is the theoretical referent for the output of writing. Rhoda’s fear of separation from the world and individuation as a subject makes her alienate herself from the physical body, as Louis comments when viewing her writing that “She has no body as the others have” (189). Alexander likens Rhoda’s, and Woolf’s, “dissolution of the bodily hold on things” to the psychic condition that paradoxically “allowed for the textured layering of spaces, sharp and disjunctive sensations that . . . could free the woman writer from the imprisoning social world” (235). Rhoda’s artistic conflict thus prefigures her alienation from the physical and social body. Although Alexander is

“only learning this now” as an adult woman writer, she argues that Woolf’s crafting of Rhoda’s conflict catalyzed aesthetic form and philosophy for Alexander as a girl reader.

Alexander argues that Rhoda experiences a concurrent artistic awakening and conflict in girlhood, a paradox Alexander implicitly identified with herself when her “girl’s mind” was both inspired by Woolf’s experimental form yet critical of its racialized content. Alexander introduces the “rich and subterranean” artistic connection “sparked” by Woolf in her girlhood:

I was twelve or thirteen when I first read The Waves . . . . I realize how my

reading of The Waves quickened my girl’s mind, a mind in search of form. The

sharp disjunctions of space, the shock of motion, the edginess of sensation, even a

violence to it so that the self can scarcely discover an underlying continuity in the

flow of consciousness, all this sparked recognition in me as a girl. (235-36) 69 Alexander remarks that this “one book had marked me so deeply, so early” through the text’s, and specifically Rhoda’s, original sensory experience (236). For Alexander, this sensory experience revealed the body’s receptivity to truth: “It was between that dark cover of that copy of The Waves that I first encountered the sense that truth could be verified by what was felt on the skin and in the bloodstream . . . the body” (234). Alexander recalls that, as a girl, “[t]his sense was critical to me” (234), a sense evocative of Martin’s theory of “subjective body knowledge.” Yet Alexander was likewise cognizant of her own simultaneous dislocation from the body, that is, from the European bodies of which Woolf writes that “would force my own body into the shadows, into the bushes, away from the ‘immaculate others’” (237). Alexander’s transnational perspective from “teenage years cut by border crossings” (234) geopoliticizes her reading because “as a girl I had no doubt that Virginia Woolf, for all her anguish, all her resistance, came from that very British world” (238). She summarizes her conflicted perspective, stating, “My early awareness of Woolf’s power and my love of her writing was cut by another emotion in me, a distinct refusal, a rage at the white, colonial world in which she lived, moved and had her being” (237). Like Rhoda, Alexander locates her creative conflict in the body because “something else has to be spelt . . . given the integrity of the body” (237). She explains the potential violence of language to the embodied self: “And while [Woolf] had the flow of

English, and bathed in the river of language, I was forever cast to the rocky shores, my feet against the sharp stones, the jagged syllables . . . the violence of a colonial pedagogy . . . hurting my girl’s mind” (238). Alexander’s sense of dis/embodiment in the formation of her migratory self-identity parallels Rhoda’s gendered dis/embodiment.

Although one girl is factual, the other fictional, each occupies a critical space in the author’s formation of artistic consciousness, both as girls and as women. Alexander even feels 70 “forced” to return to the psychic state of the self’s, and imaginary’s, development when writing as an adult. Alexander describes her current writing method through an uncannily parallel to

Rhoda’s girlhood conflict, which she theorized only two pages earlier in her essay:

These days, I am engaged in my usual practice: in between poems, scribbling

prose, the chaos of identity just about balanced by the edginess of aesthetic form.

The one and the other always entwined for me as the questions continue to haunt:

Who am I? Where am I? When am I? Again and again I feel as if I were forced to

start from scratch, each time and all over again making up self and the world.

(237)

Although this parallel with Rhoda is indirect, Alexander directly parallels her own girlhood with her description of adult authorship when narrating a girlhood scene of how “The Waves was the work I drank so deeply of in the whitewashed room of my paternal grandmother’s house” immediately before this adult theorizing (236). Like Woolf, Alexander, in a way, imagines herself as a girl in conflict in order to enable her own act of writing, returning even now to the memory of how “the lines of The Waves turned in my head . . . when I looked through my parents’ window” (237).

While writing The Waves, Woolf similarly returns to the concept of girlhood to catalyze creative contemplation and explain why she “want[s] to write criticism.” In A W e ’s Da y,

Woolf expresses some difficulties in composing The Waves: “I have begun the second part of

The Waves I don’t know. I don’t know. I feel that I am only accumulating notes for a book whether I shall ever face the labour of writing it, God knows” (150). But her immediate next diary entry explains her excitement when reading new authors “I have never heard of”: “This thought fills me with joy no overstatement. To begin reading with a pen in hand, discovering, 71 pouncing, thinking of phrases, when the ground is new, remains one of my great excitements.” In this inspired authorial state with “a pen in hand,” Woolf remembers when she “became enraptured” by Elizabethan prose as a “15 or 16” year old girl, crafting her “style” and

“criticism” when writing a juvenilia “history of Women”:

I think with some sentiment— father tramping over the Library with his little girl

sitting at H.P.G. in mind. He must have been 65; I 15 or 16 then; and why I don’t

exactly know but I became enraptured . . . the large yellow [Elizabethan] page

entranced me. I used to read it and dream of those adventurers and no doubt

practiced their style in my copybook . . . and I also wrote a history of Women; and

a history of my own family. (150)

Woolf’s girlhood returns in moments of inspiration “with a pen in hand.” Yet Woolf’s writing is destabilized by a second reference to girlhood in her diary entries when she is composing The

Waves. Draining her energy and creative time, an evening party climaxes when an “intolerable and uninspired” guest explains how another author “boasts of his sexual triumphs” and asked a

“young girl” awkwardly “to undress” on his couch (160-61). Woolf begins the entry with her inability to write: “No, I cannot write that very difficult passage in The Waves this morning . . . all because of Arnold Bennett and Ethel’s party. I can hardly get one word after another.” She recounts how Bennett “cackled out” a story of George Moore’s taking sexual advantage of a girl:

“He told me that a young girl had come to see him. And he asked her, as she sat on the sofa, to undress. And he said she took off all her clothes and let him look at her . . .” Woolf “rashly” mocks the speaker after this comment, and closes the entry with how the party “left me in a state where I can hardly drive my pen across the page” (161). The girl’s unethical exposure, as the noteworthy comment of the long evening, is framed within repeated reference to Woolf’s 72 inability to write.

Although Rhoda’s early girlhood scene of writing “figures [that] mean nothing” establishes her disembodiment, leaving “no single body for me,” Rhoda contrarily experiences her most intense sexual expression of the entire novel during her girlhood (265). In this sexual expression, Rhoda recapitulates what happens to the girl fishing in “Professions for Women” and also to Judith Shakespeare—these are girls whose sexual/textual lives are real and embodied yet in some way thwarted. Considering that Rhoda “is not yet twenty” at the end of chapter three

(249), and that chapter one outlines her early childhood, we can deduce that Rhoda is in her teens in chapter two. When reading a poem as a teen in chapter two, Rhoda’s aesthetic pleasure climaxes in physical language. Woolf does not desexualize Rhoda for her lack of constancy in the body, but instead merges physical desire with creative rumination in the girl’s sexual expression, again imbricating sexual/textual politics within girlhood. Rhoda reads Shelley’s poem and feels “my body,” “my porous body” climax in sexual/aesthetic pleasure:

I will pick flowers; I will bind flowers in one garland and clasp them and present

them—Oh! to whom? There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream

presses on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot at the center resists. Oh, this

is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am

incandescent. Now the stream pours in a deep tide fertilizing, opening the shut,

forcing the tight-folded, flooding free. To whom shall I give all that now flows

through me, from my warm, my porous body? I will gather my flowers and

present them—Oh! to whom? (213-14)

Wolf ascribes to corporeal experience what is usually assigned to the mind, locating girlhood creative rumination in the motif of what Deborah Tolman has termed bodily “pleasure and 73 danger.” Rhoda’s uncommon declarations of subjectivity and agency, announcing “I will give, I will enrich; I will return to the world this beauty” with “my body . . . my porous body,” are caused by her physical rapture and demonstrate a temporarily empowering “subjective body knowledge” as previously theorized by Karen Martin. This expression of Rhoda’s teenage desire demonstrates arguably the most reclamation over her elusive embodiment. Rhoda’s climactic lines “I faint. I fail” are taken from Shelley’s poem “The Indian Girl’s Song” gesturing toward an intertext on girlhood. Yet Rhoda’s orgasmic lament “Oh! to whom?” is for loss of a love object within her culturally unintelligible adolescent female sexuality, thus subverting Shelley’s romantic ideology into modernist expression. In “Virginia Woolf’s Two Bodies,” Molly Hite argues that this scene of Rhoda’s adolescent erotic pleasure is Virginia Woolf’s “most nearly direct representation of female sexual arousal” across all her works (para. 28). Hite summarizes that “[i]n this account, the adolescent Rhoda reads a poem that provokes a longing at first pressing to the point of pain, then released in a burst of liquidity” as a teenage orgasm (para. 28).

In her analysis of Rhoda, Hite rejects accounts of Virginia Woolf’s shrinking from physicality, arguing instead that Woolf’s canon “presents a spectrum of sentient and sensuous bodies” which Hite classifies as “visionary bodies” (para. 2-3). I posit that the teen girl body is one such “visionary body.” Visionary bodies are “extra-social” bodies with “culturally unintelligible desires” (such as lesbianism) that are “not disembodied but rather predicated on the primacy of acute—and often covertly sexual—physical sensations” yet desire “only in a very restricted and metaphorical sense” and thus experience “without social implications” (para. 4-5,

28). The familiar Western construct of mind-body dualism does not apply to the visionary body, as Hite reiterates that her theory involves “two kinds of body” as a “notion of two female bodies”

(para. 2, 35). Hite outlines examples of visionary bodies, several of which are girls with her 74 penultimate example being this scene of Rhoda’s orgasm, to argue that “the visionary body was a political as well as an aesthetic strategy of representation, a means of circumventing conditions of female decorum for female behavior and characterization” (para. 35). I am suggesting that

Hite is essentially describing the girl’s body as the imagined space for (temporary) extra-social creative sensation, and that this “body” the girl’s body is a strategic “aesthetic strategy of representation” for Woolf. I argue that by being a “girl” and not a “Woman”— a female in the process of sexual maturity rather than at full sexual maturity— the teen girl’s body is “a second physical presence in fundamental respects different from the gendered body constituted by the dominant social order” (Hite para. 3). Framing this representational strategy as modernist expression, Hite argues that the visionary body was a tactic for “writing female subjects into modernism” (para. 4), thus enabling representations of sensuous female characters “without embroiling them in the societal consequences of female eroticism that had shaped the romance plot” (para. 3). I have outlined how Woolf perceives the girl’s body/consciousness as temporarily outside of or approaching societal concepts of Woman. But I have also shown the girl’s awareness of the dominant construct, “Woman,” within these freer ruminations. Therefore, Hite ultimately determines that “no desire can be recognized or sustained wholly outside the realm of the social [therefore] the visionary novel returns the female body to social discipline” (para. 32).

Yet Rhoda continues to resist social discipline as she ages, distancing herself from the binary sexual roles for women the mother and the seductress after failed attempts to mimic

Susan and Jinny (“[Rhoda] put off the hopeless desire to be Susan, to be Jinny”). Rhoda’s seeming lack of a recognizable sexual role and desire must be considered in relation to this scene of her teenage sexual/aesthetic climax. I argue that this most direct representation of her sexual arousal foregrounds the teenage body/consciousness in Rhoda’s characterization, causing her to 75 maintain a metaphoric girlhood identity in adulthood as a palimpsestic resurfacing of her girlhood fragmentation. The types of fragmentation that characterize Rhoda’s girlhood aesthetic, interpersonal, sexual carry into her adulthood, surfacing palimpsestically to impinge on her adult life. As an adult woman, she remains stuck in the problems of “the girl”—both in terms of writing and in terms of sexuality. Rhoda cannot grow into a “woman,” as Jinny and

Susan do (lover/mistress and mother). Rhoda, even in her affair, remains a figure of the girl. Her violets for Percival represents an adolescent “crush” on him as idolized male figure, prompting her suicide after his death.

Drawing from critical moments in Rhoda’s actual girlhood, I argue that Rhoda is a continuous girl figure in her adulthood by resisting a discernable social role as “Woman” and, specifically, by resisting a socially sanctioned sexuality. Therefore, Rhoda operates in a liminal subject position of unreconciled girlhood fragmentation and “intense abstraction” from being

“perpetually conflicted” (Woolf 315). Rhoda’s resistance to a sexual identity sanctioned by society causes critic Louise Poresky to conclude that “Rhoda eludes all sexuality completely”

(189). Yet considering Rhoda’s moment of girlhood rapture “we should not view the sexually ambiguous character as an unsexed being” (Kramp 41). Rhoda’s avoidance of static social binaries including masculine/feminine, mental/physical, asexual/sexual, heterosexual/ homosexual (and, I suggest, child/adult) mirrors Deleuze and Guattari’s vision of a multiplicity of genders and sexualities through “a thousand tiny sexes.” One of the prevailing sexes for

Rhoda is that of the adolescent female. Michael Kramp argues that Rhoda’s “multi-sexed subject position [is] dangerous and threatening” to society, and likens her representation to “mov[ing] from the polarized and rigid theories of second-wave feminism to the malleable domain of gender theory” or, as I’ve posited, third wave feminism. Although Rhoda has an affair with 76 Louis, we are told as much about Rhoda leaving Louis as about their relationship. Louis tersely states “Rhoda left me” and concludes that “she is gone now like the desert heat.” Likewise,

Rhoda’s brief mention of their separation is juxtaposed with their union, stating “I left Louis; I feared embraces.” Yet this summary is preceded by the memory of a “girl” who parallels

Rhoda’s identity. Rhoda outlines how “I covered the whole street” with “the blaze and ripple of my mind,” showing that she literally and figuratively traversed her society “hold[ing] up shade after shade” against its “terrible[ness]” (318). She imagines alternative places and peoples sparked by listings on boxes, closing with the image of “some girl” standing on the pavement who is the manifestation of herself: “There were boxes, too, standing in the passage when the school broke up. I stood secretly to read the labels and dream of names and faces. Harrogate, perhaps, Edinburg, perhaps, was ruffled with golden glory where some girl whose name I forgot stood on the pavement. But it was the name only. I left Louis” (318). Rhoda remarks that she

“forgot” “the name only” of this girl, suggesting the memory of her being persists. Both other and self, “some girl” remains with Rhoda as a figure in her creative “dream[s]” which sharply precedes her break-up with Louis. Remarking that she is now “alone” in questioning “Who then comes with me?”, Rhoda answers in a palimpsestic resurfacing of her girlhood erotic motif:

“Flowers only, the cowbind and the moonlight colored may. Gathering them loosely in a sheaf I made of them in a garland and gave them Oh, to whom?” (319).

Bernard repeatedly describes Rhoda as “the nymph of the fountain,” alluding to the classical Greek myth of Arethusa which encapsulates Rhoda’s sexual deviancy. Arethusa was an eternal nymph, a perpetually youthful maiden, and depicted as a young girl on Syrcusian coins.

Vowing never to marry so as to remain chaste, she flees Alpheus’ advances and hides in a cloud where she perspires from the pursuit, turns into a fountain/stream, and returns into the ground as 77 fluid water. Figured in sensory, natural imagery as a union with an originary whole, Arethusa’s myth befits Rhoda’s existential crisis and her rejection of compulsory heterosexuality and heteronormativity in general. Furthermore, this metamorphosis into water as an image of creative escape parallels “Profession’s” girl protagonist. While Woolf has many scenes of creativity figured through ground water in her fiction, it is noteworthy that a scene from Rhoda’s teen years contains authorial identification in this motif. A famous diary entry in which Woolf experiences an existential crisis when crossing a puddle parallels Rhoda’s crisis of when, coming to a puddle, she feels disembodied, and, like Arethusa, reunified with nature. Woolf’s diary describes how she “used to feel this as a child couldn’t step across a puddle once I remember, for thinking, how strange what am I?” (101). Likewise, Rhoda explains, “I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather. I was wafted down tunnels. . . . I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle” (219). Louise DeSalvo links childhood sexual abuse to

Woolf’s crisis, arguing that fear of the reflection of Woolf’s crotch in the puddle is the cause of her alarm, thus framing this scene as one of sexual self-consciousness.

In arguably the most summative passage on Rhoda which characterizes her ephemerality, vulnerability, gender ambiguity, nature affiliation, and terminal destiny, the import of Rhoda’s final declaration as “a girl” has not been critically emphasized even though it closes all of chapter three. Rhoda’s feelings of exclusion from the artificial social scene of a party conclude in a series of comparisons in sentences beginning with “I am” which are initiated by the topic of age. Woolf writes,

Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty. I am to be broken,

I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and 78 women, with their twitching faces, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of

weed I am flung far every time the door opens. The wave breaks. I am the foam

that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a

girl, here in this room. (249)

Rhoda’s overwhelming sense of vulnerability is reminiscent of Woolf’s “unshielded” and

“receptive” self-description as a teen in “A Sketch of the Past.” This susceptibility and her sense of differentiation from “men and women” are framed within reference to her age and being a

“girl.” Identification as “a girl” is once again in proximity to the mention of a “room” as a repeated setting for girlhood consciousness. Rhoda moves from the literal descriptor of age into figurative descriptors of nature and back into the actuality of time and place as “also” being “a girl, here in this room.” In this prose, the wave-like crest into creative figuration then wane back into literality does not polarize these realms but interweaves them since Rhoda is both “the foam” of the wave’s movement and “also a girl” (my emphasis). Rhoda’s future-projected rhetoric of what she is “to be” but is “not yet” nonetheless repeats the types of trauma she currently experiences, thus conflating both stasis as a teen and the passage of time. Rhoda’s inability to grasp the passage of time can relay the presence of a perpetual girl identity in her failure to transcend her girlhood’s fragmentation. Rhoda explains, “I cannot make one moment merge into the next” and projects this measurement of life duration onto others as “your days and hours” (265). Time’s passing suggests a cohesion of self that Rhoda cannot achieve, as she summarizes, “I do not know how to run minute to minute and hour to hour, solving them by some natural force until they make the whole and indivisible mass you call life” (265).

While critics treat Louis as Rhoda’s “double” because they both occupy an outsider status yet negotiate this status differently based on gender, Rhoda’s estrangement from the flow of time 79 positions her as a double for the “the girl” in prologues, the girl whose “natural force” generates time’s passage. Continually, Rhoda opposes the mystical sun girl’s representation in major thematic and imagistic pairings of the two involving: the shock of sensation, union with nature, the fate of differentiation, dominant characterizations of face/lessness, and the passage of time.

Rhoda’s declaration that she is “a girl, here in this room” closes the chapter with the following prologue beginning “The sun, no longer couched on a green mattress.” This prologue, framed between two that open with the image of “the girl,” does not name the sun girl but allows

Rhoda’s concluding characterization to carry over. Likewise, Rhoda repeatedly describes herself with this motif of a mattress, one that is not a landscape but a bed mattress where, since girlhood, her restful rumination makes her struggle with a sense of existential disembodiment: “There is only a thin sheet between me now and the infinite depths. The lumps in the mattress soften beneath me” (319). In Louis’ account of Rhoda peering out a window, he describes how she

“comes at . . . the most prosaic hour of midday,” creating an imagistic parallel with the sun girl that nonetheless conveys their difference: “Rhoda, with her intense abstraction, with her unseeing eyes the colour of a snail’s flesh, does not destroy you, western wind, whether she comes at midnight when the stars blaze or at the most prosaic hour of midday. She stands at the window and looks at the chimney pots and the broken windows in the houses of poor people”

(315). Rhoda’s “unseeing eyes” oppose the sun girl’s “wide-open eyes [which] drove” light over the land. Yet Rhoda “does not destroy” either day or night, as one who cannot affect her environment. These contrary representations create a dialogue around the figure of the girl as a central dynamic trope in conceptions of creativity and time which, in a text representing a collective creative imagination, prioritizes the girl in women’s self-identity and authorship.

Through a Third Wave Girls’ Studies perspective, A Room of One’s Own, “Professions for 80 Women,” and The Waves’ repeated invocations of the girl articulate contemporary feminist discourses on the liberation of women and girls, as well as possible ideological and psychical connections between differing aged femininities.

Conclusion

By rhetorically and imagistically inserting the girl in scenes of struggle with creative writing, thinking, and embodiment, Woolf centralizes girlhood in constructing the adult woman artist’s position. If Woolf “prefer[s] to put it in the form of fiction” (Room 113), the dominance of the girl in major fictionalized scenes in her essays and in her most experimental novel suggests the importance of girlhood as an identity category, the reality of girl sexuality, and the conflation of girlhood sexual/textual politics. Recognizing that embodied desires and sexual subjectivity should be developmentally expected in female adolescence is controversial even today. Michelle Fine terms the discursive absence in adults’ discussions and teachings of girl sexuality as the “missing discourse of desire” (29). Fine highlights societal and critical insistence on defining female adolescent sexuality only in terms of morality, disease, and pregnancy as avoiding a candid discussion of girls, or with girls, on their sexual selves.

In theorizing women’s sexual and social selves in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf remarks that one cannot “tell the truth” about such controversies—which is any inquiry into sex—but rather one must “show” the development into this viewpoint of “how I arrived at this opinion”

(3-4). She explains: “When a subject is highly controversial—and any question about sex is that—one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold” (4; emphasis added). Woolf thus uses narrative to express the process of

“how one came to” personal truths, concluding that “[f]iction here is likely to contain more truth than fact” (4). Her fictional mode privileges the individual, active process of how the girl “came 81 to hold . . . opinion[s]” within larger, systemic inequities that “women,” as a collective category and fixed gender role, must socially theorize.

Of the few remaining references to girls in Room, Woolf thematizes potentiality. She implies that the impact of girlhood agency on the would-be woman writer is essential to women’s literary history. She questions if “girls could go to their parents and say, You need not give me an allowance. I can make money with my pen” (64), then by “go[ing] into business at the age of fifteen, there would have been” increased financial and literary inheritance for women

(21-22). Woolf outlines this narrative absence within the larger absence of women’s literature, stating that “[a]nd there is the girl behind the counter too—I would as soon have her true story as the hundred and fiftieth life of Napoleon or seventieth study of Keats” (90). While the work of many contemporary women authors focuses on “telling the truth about [our] experiences as bod[ies],” it is perhaps one goal of third-wave feminism to tell the story behind even those bodies, the story of the woman’s history as an embodied girl’s history.

82 Chapter Two: Othering the Girl: Girlhood Agency, Madness, and Puberty in The Second Sex

It is remarkable that in all those forms of behavior the young girl does not seek to transcend the natural and social order, she does not aim to extend the limits of the possible nor to work a transvaluation of values; she is content to display her revolt within the bounds of a world the frontiers and laws of which are preserved. That is the attitude often defined as “demoniac.” Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (357)

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex contains integral yet contradictory portrayals of girlhood. Overall, Beauvoir denies the girl full subjectivity, sexual embodiment, and feminist identity, yet requires her for the developmental model of each. The girl both explains and opposes the social category “Woman” and biological category “women.” While Beauvoir’s paradoxical treatment of girlhood emphasizes the girl’s centrality to feminist theory, she contains her analysis so as not to threaten a focus on the adult. Beauvoir’s later extensive work on old age supports my argument that she prioritizes the category of age in theorizing the subject.33 This chapter argues that girls and women are hierarchically and dichotomously ordered in The Second

Sex to show that, while Beauvoir is famous for theorizing that woman is man’s Other, Beauvoir others the girl in figuring woman’s position.34 Specifically, Beauvoir others the girl within

33 The Coming of Age (originally published as La Vieillesse, 1970, and translated in the US in 1972) is Beauvoir’s monumental study on growing old and on the elderly’s subordinated, ostracized, and erased position in society. Beauvoir’s representation of old age and ageing shows the extent to which she prioritizes difference with regard to age. Old age is a “forbidden subject” in Western culture, she writes, because “Society looks upon old age as a kind of shameful secret that it is unseemly to mention” (1). “Old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization,” Beauvoir concludes (543). Some critics suggest that Beauvoir repeats her theory of the Other put forth in The Second Sex in her discussion of the elderly, as in Alison Martin’s “Old Age and the Other-Within: Beauvoir’s Representation of Ageing in La Vieillesse.”

34 To my knowledge, Jennifer Eisenhauer is the only scholar besides myself who argues that the girl is the woman’s Other in The Second Sex. While Eisenhauer is concerned with the general binarization of the gender classifications “girls” and “women” as a form of othering, I examine specific categories in which the girl is othered. Eisenhauer focuses on the discursive construct “girl” over the biological category, looking for “an understanding of the ‘girl’ not simply as something that someone is (a question of being and ontology), but as something that someone is discursively constituted as” (79). I also investigate “girl” as a social sign in Beauvoir’s work, yet my analysis furthermore recognizes actual age and embodiment in defining girlhood in order to analyze conjunctions and disjunctions between Beauvoir’s deployment of a collective construct “girl,” her varying representations of girls and 83 categories that reinforce her position as a woman theorist: categories of subjectivity, agency, and social critique. Yet even within its adult-centered focus, The Second Sex nonetheless addresses controversial topics on girlhood that are only now receiving critical attention, such as girls’ self-mutilation in Girls’ Studies scholarship. Furthermore, Beauvoir’s delineation of girlhood– although used to theorize a trajectory toward womahood– supports a Girls’ Studies frame. Her use of scholarly research on girls, literary representations of girls, and excerpts of real girls’ voices parallels fundamental methodologies in the field. In sum, Beauvoir’s contrary deployment of girlhood enacts contemporary debates surrounding the inclusion or exclusion of

Girls’ Studies in Women’s Studies and feminist theory.

My discussion of “the girl” as articulated in Beauvoir’s work is for the purposes of highlighting how The Second Sex structurally and argumentatively relies on negative, limiting discursive constructs of girlhood, making the social sign “Girl,” not just “Woman,” a dominant trope in Beauvoir’s philosophical imaginary. From this initial investigation, I note a disconnection between Beauvoir’s othering the girl, and her simultaneous implication of girlhood as a potential avenue for feminist inquiry. In this context, I problematize how Beauvoir negates the authenticity, depth, and efficacy of girls’ physical and creative agency, revealing that agency is a key category in which she others the girl. I link Beauvoir’s argument on girls’ passivity and physical weakness to contemporary Girls’ Studies discourses on girl aggression and “mean girls.” I re-read Beauvoir’s scenes of girls’ writing and narrativity using Girls’ Studies empirical literature on girls’ written forms as resistant practices to hegemonic gendered scripts. Overall,

Beauvoir simultaneously praises and criticizes girls’ writings. She uses girls’ writings prolifically

their voices, and Girls’ Studies data on real girls. Eisenhauer’s article contains no research from Girls’ Studies. Finally, Eisenhauer’s article does not contain any quotes from The Second Sex, treating the text as an entry into a figures that destabilize binary constructions in feminist theory. However, a section of Eisenhauer’s dissertation in Art Education close reads The Second Sex. 84 as evidence alongside and in dialogue with women writers, who she commends for “go[ing] on as adults with the passionate designs of adolescence” (364). Yet she conversely critiques the merit of girls’ writings by framing them as escapist, damaging, and narcissistic. Beauvoir’s treatment of girls’ physical and narrative expressions reveals her difficult negotiation of girl culture in a text theorizing women’s culture.

Cumulatively, this chapter reveals Beauvoir’s overriding thematization of girlhood as a time of madness. I argue that madness is Beauvoir’s principle motif for both defining and othering the girl. Beauvoir theorizes that the critical juncture defining girlhood is the girl’s move from subject status (supposed in childhood) to object status (conferred in womanhood). This transition results in “anxiety” psychosomatically affecting the pubertal body as well as innately existing in the pubertal body’s hormonal maturation. Beauvoir defines the girl’s mentality as simultaneously in “disgust,” “desire,” and “denial” of this social, physical, and sexual

“becoming” (336, 352). Based on the girl’s contrary nature, Beauvoir classifies her as overridingly in a “position of continual denial. This is the trait that characterizes the young girl and gives us the key to most of her behavior; she does not accept the destiny assigned to her by nature and society; and yet she does not repudiate it completely” (352). Because “[s]he simultaneously longs for and dreads the shameful passivity” of her future role as Woman, the girl’s divided nature leaves her “in a state of semi-lunacy” and her maturing body, including

“[t]he appearance of menstruation[,] drives her half mad” (308, 321, 329). Beauvoir includes an array of mental disability rhetoric on the “disorders of puberty,” which “constitute a handicap” for the girl as an “imaginary invalid” (316, 329). The girl experiences “psychic difficulties,”

“neurotic conditions,” “organic disorders,” “[m]anias, tics, plots, perversities” and “instability” from being “nervous and irritable,” “inward, disturbed,” “sick,” and finally “‘demoniac’” (316, 85 329, 332-33, 356-57, 360). Beauvoir compares girls to “hysterical paralytic patients” and links their physical maturation and mental divisiveness to case studies on adolescent “psychic crises”

(356). Although Beauvoir identifies sexual intercourse as the physical milestone transitioning girl into woman because “it remains an act of violence that changes a girl into a woman” as “an abrupt rupture with the past,” she foregrounds the psychological transition from madness to acquiescence as demarcating girl and woman (372). Therefore, madness becomes Beauvoir’s primary motif for othering the girl.

Considering how “[t]he past twenty years have seen a Beauvoir revival in feminist theory

[with] [f]eminist philosophers, political scientists, and historians of ideas all making powerful contributions to our understanding of her philosophy, above all The Second Sex,”35 I embrace a timely moment to approach Beauvoir’s work through the contemporary lens of Girls’ Studies in analyzing the intersection of girlhood agency, narrativity, and psychosexual embodiment in her feminist philosophy (Moi, “What?” 189). Because Toril Moi remarks, however, that “[l]iterary studies have lagged somewhat behind” in this revival, I connect a foundational motif in feminist literary theory on woman characters and writers’ “madness” to Beauvoir’s portrayals of girlhood

(“What?” 189). In doing so, I will recuperate and nuance a subjectivity in The Second Sex that reveals Beauvoir’s own anxiety about constructing the feminist subject. Beauvoir’s own contrary, divided treatment of the girl as a figure who both explains and opposes the woman, within a theory requiring the “denial” of girls’ agency, reveals a latent textual “anxiety” within feminism.

Othering the Girl

35 With 2008 marking the 100th anniversary of Beauovir’s birth, PMLA’s January 2009 issue devoted its “Theories and Methodologies” section to an overview of new Beauvoir research, including essays from Toril Moi and five others tracing contemporary interpretations. For new Beauvoir scholarship from around 1990, see Fallaize Novels, Kruks Situation and Human Existence; and Le Doeuff H ppa h a’s Cho ce. 86 This chapter examines Beauvoir’s paradigmatic motif of “becoming” as a form of othering in order to examine the girl’s placement in feminist theory. This dissertation asks: How can isolating and examining girlhood resist the security of conventional models to author a new kind of feminist text? If feminists have made a conflating move by combining girl and woman through a future trajectory of “becoming,” to separate them through Girls’ Studies is to de- essentialize. The Second Sex’s conflation of girls and women in order to de-essentialize women and Woman enacts the epistemological tension of Girls’ Studies placement both within and outside of Women’s Studies. I will use Beauvoir’s own concept of the Other to interrogate how her essentializing theory of “becoming” is, paradoxically, a theory of othering. Certainly multiple definitions of the Other exist, making “the phallic subject’s Other conceived variously as a decentered, ex-centric, or fragmented subject, or as a discursive subject, or as a subject in process” (Knight 64). I employ the definition of the Other as a “subject in process” and

Beauvoir’s relational definition of Woman as man’s Other. I show that Beauvoir others the girl by denying girls a subject position when defining girlhood as contradictory to a normative, cohesive social subject of Woman, or an ideal subject of feminism: liberated women.

In The Second Sex, Beauvoir denies girlhood a stable, identifiable subject category. She represents girlhood as a vacillation between the social categories “child” and “woman,” and represents the girl as “torn . . . between the past and the future” within an unintelligible temporality that negates personhood (336). Beauvoir writes of the girl that, “[a]t fourteen,” “the future scares her, the present dissatisfies her; she hesitates to become woman; she is vexed to be still only a child; she has already left her past behind, but she has not yet entered upon a new life.

She is busy but she does nothing; because she does nothing, she has nothing, she is nothing”

(357). The girl is likewise torn between polar temperaments, “Oscillating between desire and 87 disgust, between hope and fear, declining what she calls for, linger[ing] in suspense between the tie of childish independence and that of womanly submission” (336). The girl occupies a liminal space where she negotiates two more socially intelligible subject categories while nevertheless becoming, and being defined through, something other than she currently is. This future- trajectory “is the painful dilemma with which the woman-to-be must struggle” as “the present seems but a time of transition” (328). For the girl, “her metamorphosis” as a “strange form of matter, ever-changing, indefinite” is analogous to “her nothingness” (307, 336, 359). Beauvoir materializes the girl’s future-direction within her pubertal body, arguing that “With puberty, the future not only approaches: it takes residence in her body; it assumes the most concrete reality” as “the rich fleshly future” (328, 364). Beauvoir designates the girl’s pubertal body only with reference to the sexually-active, procreative, mothering body it will soon form as “woman,” classifying “What is happening at this time of unrest [a]s the child’s body becoming that of a woman and being made flesh” (306). If girlhood is the process of “being made” into the full embodiment of woman, than the pubertal body is a lacking body. Emphasizing the social discourse of girls’ development, Beauvoir highlights terminology of process for the pubertal girl

“now [that] she is ‘developing’” (307). Uniting the discursive and the actual, she troubles the girl’s sense of existence, stating, “The word [‘developing’] seems horrifying . . . in the development of her breasts the girl senses the ambiguity of the word living” (307 emphasis in orig).

Famous for theorizing that “man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him,”

Beauvoir defines the girl as relative to woman (xxii). She positions girls below women in a hierarchical relationship where the girl stands for all characteristics associated with the limitation of the female gender as a state to overcome. Arguing that man establishes his subject position in 88 opposition to that of woman as his Other, Beauvoir reproduces this binary by situating the adult woman’s position through delineation from the girl. Beauvoir therefore others the girl, denying girls a subject position because girlhood is defined as contradictory to a normative, cohesive social subject of Woman, or an ideal subject of feminism: liberated women. In fact, the girl is not only the woman’s preceding biology and socialization, but also an implied sign signifying a failure of gender subjectivity. If the “girl” is defined only through future-projection into woman, we might, instead, reflexively term failure of the adult woman subject as “girl.” Eisenhauer posits this reversal, theorizing that “Women who lack the characteristics to effectively meet the criteria of a male-defined subjectivity, are not women at all, but are girls” (“Subject” 42). I note that, within Beauvoir’s existentialist standpoint, woman must transcend her girlhood since it is the paradigmatic marker of her “immanence.” While Beauvoir is cognizant of the ideological equation of women to children, suggesting that “[t]here are women who remain children all their lives,” she does not recognize her own iteration of this message in her girl/woman binary, nor the interpretive potential of investigating “Girl” as a sign within her own culture or work, and outside her goal of theorizing women (365).

Beauvoir deploys stereotypical discourses of weak-mindedness, vulnerability, narcissism, powerlessness, and unintelligibile sexuality for girls, despite her brief critique of the sexual

“hypocrisy” of the image of the “good little girl,” noting that “[t]he young girl is dedicated to

‘purity’ and ‘innocence’. . . She is supposed to be white as snow, transparent as crystal” in the face of her “actual” sexual feelings, “thoughts and desires” (322). Trivializing critical inquiry into girls’ “daily existence” and “potentialities,” Beauvoir declares that “to ask what is the truth of the girl’s nature means little in her situation” (358). Beauvoir consequently blurs the distinction between the girl’s “situation” and her nature, asserting that the girl’s “adolescent 89 romancing seems truer to her potentialities than the vapid facts of her daily existence, . . . [than] the absence of real activities” (358). Beauvoir therefore stereotypes the girl, conflating the girl’s situation with her nature to assert that “she is sensitive and vain” and “she is jealous and spiteful”

(359). Noting how “[i]t is clear that all these faults [stereotypes] flow simply from the adolescent girl’s situation,” Beauvoir nonetheless denies girls the agency to resist or change their situation by treating them as products of and vehicles for whatever the social climate may be (359). In this way, Beauvoir applies stereotypes of girls’ weakness and impressionability a priori to their situation. The girl’s malleability, her “becoming,” is her nature. Even Beauvoir’s suggestion of possible emancipation dislocates girls and girlhood from liberatory change. She writes, “The young girl’s character and behavior is the result of her situation. If this [situation] is modified, then the adolescent girl takes on a different aspect. Today it is becoming possible for her to take her future in her own hands” (368). The girl’s development into Woman defines the girl, while the possibility of a “different,” actualized girlhood is framed within forward-trajectory of

“becoming” a new, “future” self in an actualized womanhood. In this framework, girl subjectivity, culture, and resistance are impossible. Girls’ Studies theorist Sherrie Inness contests the argument that girls are passive vehicles of social ideology rather than active agents in meaning-making within and against social ideology: “It is important to consider the culture that girls themselves create as active producers and shapers of their realities as well as the culture that is created and shaped by adults and then marketed to girls” (4). She posits that girls demonstrate a spectrum of acceptance and resistance such that girls, “in their turn, shape market place commodities[,]” as well as shape the encoded behavior and gender ideology of adults’ social messages “in ways that might or might not have been intended by their creators” (4). Unlike

Beauvoir’s dismissal of girls’ “daily existence” as “vapid” and their “real activities” as 90 “absen[t],” Inness embraces girls’ distinctive cultural analyses and products, arguing that

“studying girls’ culture is essential to understanding how gender works in our society” (5).

By denying girls’ distinctive agency, subjectivity, and social resistance, Beauvoir defines girls’ as mediums for materializing Woman’s situation. The girl internalizes gender ideology to create Woman, “establish[ing] its truth”: “the adolescent girl does not think herself responsible for her future; she sees no use in demanding much of herself since her lot in the end will not depend on her own efforts. Far from consigning herself to man because she recognizes her own inferiority, it is because she is thus consigned to him that, accepting the idea of her inferiority, she establishes its truth” (335). Although the girl explains the social development of Woman and the biological development of women, she encapsulates neither. Rather, girlhood is the life stage that counters both categories as Beauvoir others the girl by deploying negative social stereotypes of “Girl” to concretize her subject of women. Beauvoir requires the gender construct “Girl” to philosophize the gender construct “Woman.”

Because the girl is simultaneously woman and not woman, nature and culture, girlhood in

The Second Sex is a kind of theoretical blind spot that ultimately locates a contested critical nexus in Beauvoir scholarship as a constructivist and biologist axis. Foregrounding the sex/gender distinction despite controversial forays into biological essentialism, Beauvoir’s seemingly contrary theories originate in her treatment of girlhood. The onset of female bodily sexual signification in girlhood initiates these conflicting theories. The section “The Formative

Years” analyzes girlhood as a “time of unrest” by establishing women’s learned submission and objectification while treating pubertal changes as destroying subjectivity (306, 267-424). Yet

Beauvoir argumentatively prioritizes “becoming” over the destination of adulthood, and sees

“Woman” as an undesirably rigid identity. The section defines girlhood less by age and body 91 than by socialized characteristics, yet the girl’s developing biological teen body, newly recognizable as sexed, necessitates this gendered socialization. Beauvoir acknowledges the girl’s embodied pleasures and pains, yet frames each within relentless social interpellation. She situates the girl’s pubertal, newly menstruating body only with reference to the sexually-active, procreative woman’s body, thus signifying the girl’s body through adult biology it does not fully share yet and through the adult role of heterosexual, reproducer it symbolizes but is denied. In doing so, girlhood fertility and maternity is inconceivable. Beauvoir argumentatively rejects woman’s confinement to the maternal body, yet the maternal body is the foundation of the girl’s existence. Thus, Beauvoir theoretically imbricates subjectivity and materiality in the female body yet posits neither fully in the foundation of that process. Perhaps her greatest theoretical disjunction, Beauvoir defines girlhood as the process of women’s socialized submission and objectification, but also the only time to change that process. Yet she denies girls the ability to change that process while framing women as concerned only with the product of that process in the social construct “Woman” and women’s adult struggles. For Beauvoir, emancipation is ultimately won through women’s economic equality and opportunity, a solution from which she omits girls. I suggest using current scholarship from Girls’ Studies to investigate how Beauvoir conceptualizes girlhood as an originary site for her sex/gender theorizations. This dialogue may have the potential to unravel her seemingly shifting constructivist and biologist theories throughout the text, shifts that perhaps bear some fundamental relation to not recognizing the girl’s subjectivity.

Sarah Fishwick argues that free indirect discourse turns Beauvoir’s seemingly biologist passages into acts of deploying a constructed (girlhood) consciousness that “enables her analysis to achieve” reconciliation with her principal sex/gender distinction. She concludes that Beauvoir 92 styles the girl’s point of view as free indirect discourse to dramatize and ironize stereotypical discursive significations of the biological body. Fishwick begins by implying that girlhood is the site for Beauvoir’s biologist and constructivist origins of conflict:

When Beauvoir evokes the young girl’s experience of puberty, the female body

during menstruation is equally depicted as a site of stagnation, decay and ‘swamp-

like’ viscosity which inspires disgust and promtoes alienation. . . . [S]he also

suggests that menstruation is not so much burdensome in itself, but inspires horror

in the adolescent girl because it confirms her identification with the feminine

“Other.” (60, 62)

Reconciling these contrary modes, Beauvoir “depicts the young girl’s experience of menstruation through the eyes of the girl herself,” according to Fishwick (73 my emphasis). She writes, “By means of this narrative technique . . . Beauvoir is able to paint a vivid picture of the bodily changes of puberty as they are lived and viewed by the adolescent girl, and to do so to ironic effect. Beauvoir is able to mock those bodily stereotypes that, her narrative implicitly suggests, inform the young girl’s angst-ridden induction into womanhood” (73). In this argument,

Beavuoir’s dramatization of the girl’s point of view links discursive bodily signification and the female’s experience of embodiment, reframing seemingly biologist passages on the repellent, decaying, malodourous, and terrifying menstruating body. While Fishwick’s argument compounds the girl’s prominence in Beauvoir’s work as both an explicit representational figure and an implicit fictionalized consciousness, it also imagines the girl as an impressionable, uncritical mouthpiece for hyperbolizing social discourse. More largely, in this context the narrative technique of free indirect discourse ultimately positions girlhood as a place to critique gender stereotypes for women, rather than a site containing the potential for girls’ gender 93 subversion, critique, or agency. When Beauvoir “mock[s] those bodily stereotypes” that she depicts “through the eyes of the girl herself,” she simultaneously mocks the girl.

To show that much is at stake for Beauvoir studies in investigating significations of

“Girl” in her work and critical reception, I note that early critiques of Beauvoir overwhelmingly used terminology that aligned Beauvoir with the figure of the schoolgirl. Toril Moi notes,

“Among critics who are out to disparage Beauvoir as an intellectual, one of the most frequent terms of abuse is naivety. . . By working the naivety topos to exhaustion, her critics want to convey a picture of a childlike creature, unconscious of the efforts of her own discourse. As such this figure rejoins and reinforces that of the schoolgirl: both work together to produce the image of a false intellectual” (Simone 91, 92 emphasis in orig). My chapter highlights how Beauvoir others the girl specifically within categories of subjectivity, agency, and creativity which reinforce her position as an intellectual. Ironically, in this instance, Beauvoir both constructs and reinforces the negative signification used against her. Jennifer Baumgardner concludes that women’s critical distancing from the term “girl” overlooks the positive in girlhood and, I would add, girls’ capacity to destabilize the reductive stereotypes used against them. She writes,

“Second-wave feminists fought so hard for women not to be reduced to a ‘girl’ they didn’t lay claim to the good in being a girl” (61 emphsis in orig).

The Pen and the Sword: Girlhood “Passivity,” Physical Aggression, and Narrative Agency

In this section, I outline Beauvoir’s definition of the adolescent girl’s situation, focusing on the girl’s primary characteristics of “passivity,” “divided[ness],” “insincerity,” and “anxiety.”

Based on this definition, Beauvoir negates the authenticity and efficacy of girls’ physical and creative agency. The girl is unable to project herself into the world and is thus an anxious, inward being incapable of genuinely considering or affecting change. The girl possesses a 94 contrary psychosexual “attitude” of both wanting and rejecting her future position as Woman that negates her critical articulations and occludes a feminist consciousness. Beauvoir concludes,

“The attitude of the young girl is to be defined essentially by the fact that, in the anguished shadows of her insincerity, she denies while accepting the world and her destiny” (357). I briefly challenge this portrait of the girl’s deficient agency by inserting Girls’ Studies scholarship on girls’ aggression, embodiment, and writing into Beauvoir’s frames. Notably, there are marked contradictions in Beauvoir’s treatment of the girl as writer. Beauvoir aligns the girl with the

“imaginary” and “narrativity” as a “storyteller,” praises the girl’s writing as “an original sensitivity,” and uses excerpts from girls’ writings throughout her analyses (357, 362). Yet she simultaneously critiques the girl’s narrative modes as “narcissistic,” “silliness,” and dangerous for “envelop[ing] the whole existence” (341). Then Beauvoir paradoxically praises adult women authors for “go[ing] on with passionate designs of adolescence” (364). This inconsistency demonstrates Beauvoir’s waffling about the merit of girl culture, and the potential for theorizing girls’ feminist expressions. Overall, I provide this outline to show that Beauvoir defines girlhood principally through psychic inwardness, anxiety, and the imaginary, a foundation for her thematization of girlhood as a time of madness.

Beauvoir defines female adolescence as an “age” when the girl’s appending social role as object conflicts with her assertion of agency. She summarizes “the adolescent girl’s situation[:] It is a most unfortunate condition to be in, to feel oneself passive and dependant at the age of hope and ambition, at the age when the will to live and to make a place in the world is running strong.

At just this conquering age, woman learns that for her there is to be no conquest” (359). In this age group, puberty’s physical changes and menstruation transition childhood into girlhood, causing the young girl to feel alien to herself as a condition of now being consciously feminine. 95 Alienated from her pubertal body, “[t]he young girl feels that her body is getting away from her, it is no longer the straightforward expression of her individuality; it becomes foreign to her; and at the same time she becomes for others a thing” (308). With being conscious of her bodily femininity comes “passivity and accepted dependency” as the girl loses her social position as an

“autonomous individual” to distressingly move from activity to passivity as object (336).

Beauvoir writes, “The passivity that is the essential characteristic of the ‘feminine’ woman is a trait that develops in [the young girl] from the earliest years. . . . Passivity is made to seem desirable to the young girl” amid her “symbolic struggle against it” (352).

Adopting a Freudian perspective, Beauvoir likewise treats female sexuality as biologically passive, outlining the girl’s move into a passive eroticism for lack of a male sex organ in which to affirm her subjectivity and achieve transcendence. The girl’s sexuality “is not active” since “she does not dream of taking, shaping, violating; her part is to wait; to want”

(321). The girl’s psychosocial conflict of moving into the passive position Woman takes place in her desirous, pubertal body as “Those feelings which arose from a profound divorce between her childish organism and her adult future [n]ow have their source in the very complexity the young girl senses in her flesh” (321). Contrarily rejecting and craving her future, the girl “realizes that she is destined for possession; since she wants it; and she revolts against her desires. She simultaneously longs for and dreads the shameful passivity” (321). Based on the girl’s contrary nature, Beauvoir classifies her as overridingly in a “position of continual denial. This is the trait that characterizes the young girl and gives us the key to most of her behavior; she does not accept the destiny assigned to her by nature and society; and yet she does not repudiate it completely” (352). Toril Moi describes how, “[p]ermitting no clear-cut positing of a subject and an other, this ambivalent mixture . . . suggests that there is an ever-present tension or even 96 struggle between the little girl’s transcendent subjectivity and her ambivalent alienation”

(Simone, 160). Corresponding to the feminist model of the girl as “becoming” Woman, Moi labels the girl’s psychology as a “process,” arguing, “the girl’s psychological structures under patriarchy must be pictured as a complex and mobile process, rather than static and fixed image”

(Simone, 160 emphasis in orig).

While outlining how the girl’s alienation and dividedness occlude her transcendence, Moi nonetheless questions some of Beauvoir’s primary assumptions. She queries why the girl’s crisis results specifically in passivity, and where the girl’s transcendence is displaced to if not figured by her vagina. Moi comments,

this ambivalent mixture prevents the girl from achieving reintegration of her

alienated transcendence. . . . In her alienated state the little girl apparently

becomes ‘passive’ and ‘inert.’ But why is this the outcome of the girl’s

alienation? The ‘alienated’ penis, after all, was perceived by the boy as a proud

image of his transcendence. Why does this not happen to the girl’s whole body?

Where does her transcendence go? On this point Beauvoir’s text is not

particularly easy to follow. (Simone, 159-60 my emphasis)

Questions about why the girl’s transcendence is not recognized in her body or demonstrated in her behavior, whose answers remain muddled in “text [that] is not particularly easy to follow,” suggest that Beauvoir’s evacuation of the girl’s transcendence, ability to act, and embodied identification is problematic. Within Beauvoir’s frames, theorists in Girls’ Studies contest classifying the girl’s readying for womanhood as “passive” by problematizing girls’ “passivity” and subjective crisis with attention to the politics of girlhood identity construction. Catherine

Driscoll argues that “training in being a girl” involves “advice/products” which girls use to 97 aggressively shape the self, revealing the active dynamics of identity construction within the seemingly passive adoption of preexisting constructs (76-77). Reframing the girl’s experience of a sexually-passive body, Driscoll argues that the model of “how to become the girl who becomes the desirable woman” requires girls’ actions to dynamically eroticize the body as a paradoxically-inscribed “space of waiting.” She writes, “Far from prescribing sexual activity, the girl’s body is eroticized in a space of preparation for heterosexual activity, in an aestheticized space of waiting that is nevertheless not at all passive” (76-77 my emphasis). Likewise, in The

Body Project, Joan Jacob Brumberg argues that girls are encouraged to see their bodies as their primary “projects” and to expend considerable time, energy, attention, and activity to appearance. Beauvoir does address the girl’s adoption of normative feminine appearance through products like “[m]ake-up, false hair, girdles, and ‘reinforced’ brassieres [which] are all lies” and actions like “expressions [which] are artfully induced [as] every gesture and smile becomes an appeal” (357). But she does not deconstruct the girl’s negotiation, resistance, or creation of these passive fronts, but simply represents girls adopting them, and their resultant anxiety.

The interpersonal dynamics among girls reconfigure the linear movement of the girl into a constructed “passivity.” Because Beauvoir is concerned foremost with the female’s relationship to man, she compares girls to boys and therefore isolates “the girl” from the politics of her interactions with other girls. Beauvoir both alienates the girl from herself and alienates girls among themselves, arguing that “young girls quickly tire of one another; they do not band together in their prison for mutual benefit; and this is one of the reasons why the company of boys is necessary to them” (335). “The young girl” is singularly conceived in the text, a method of representation that both undermines the conceit of a collective “girlhood” and overlooks how girls negotiate their movement into object status amongst themselves. Considering the dynamics 98 of social competition that organize heteronormative femininity, Jessica Ringrose analyzes the

“often violent heterosexualized politics within which girls are incited to compete for boys and men” inside a contradictory context of girlhood “passivity” and objectification (34). In “Teen

Girls Negotiating Discourses of Competitive, Heterosexualized Aggression,” Ringrose presents girls’ paradoxical “situation” as one where girls perceive themselves as agents of their own self- representation and aggressively compete to articulate this representation, while nonetheless projecting an identity as “object” rather than agent. She writes that girlhood

combines a form of aggressively displaying the self who desires the [boy], but as

the hypersexualized object of a masculinized gaze of desire (which women

internalize and enact upon other women/girls also). This type of competitive,

sexualized aggression, which is actually a repression of outward directed desire

and a fetishization of recognition through being constituted as object of others’

desire, has become a dominant postfeminist discourse of femininity. (36)

Ringrose reframes girls’ projection of a passive, objectified femininity into a source for their competitive aggression. By repressing their “outward directed desire” to emote passive waiting and objecthood, girls’ self-surveillance and group regulation involve social dynamics which trouble the construct “passivity” furthered by Beauvoir, and address the omission “Where does her transcendence go?” questioned by Moi. Re-seeing Beauvoir’s theory of how the girl both

“longs for and dreads the shameful passivity” of womanhood, these Girls’ Studies scholars recognize the nuances of girls’ agency as both undermining and articulating this paradox.

In The Second Sex, Beauvoir declares the girl is “too much divided against herself” to achieve liberty or resistance because “it is not for the adolescent girl to affirm or impose herself” psychologically, physically, or socially (352, 354). Beauvoir negates girls’ ability to affect or 99 escape their society, concluding, “the adolescent girl . . . may hope neither to change the world nor transcend it” (354). Although the female is shaped by biology and the changing historical situations in which she exists, woman is also an existent who can act to transcend and transform her situation. However, the girl cannot act because “She has no real will, but only shifting desires” and she “lack[s] physical power” (331, 358). For Beauvoir, existence precedes essence, so meaning must be constructed by an individual through acts. In Beauvoir’s existentialist framework, “An existent is nothing other than what he does; the possible does not extend beyond the real, essence does not precede existence: in pure subjectivity, the human being is not anything. He is to be measured by his acts” (257). Because the girl is the inessential, Beauvoir asserts, “she can only be, not act, she is under a curse. . . . So she goes onward towards the future, wounded, shameful, culpable” (327, 358). In this same chapter Beauvoir outlines a spectrum of girls’ responses to maturation, ranging from harmful self-mutilation, to illegal kleptomania, to distancing laughter, to productive diary writing. Yet she deems none of these subversively effective. Even the girl’s self-mutilation, or “cutting” as commonly termed in Girls’

Studies research, lacks authentic, expressive intent because “Her sad-masochistic aberrations involve a basic insincerity” (354). Beauvoir treats the girl’s cutting as recognition of her fleshly stature as Woman, marking the girl’s “accept[ance] through her repudiation.” She theorizes that

“if the girl lets herself practice [self-mutilation], it means that she accepts, through her repudiation, the womanly future in store for her; she would not humiliate her flesh with hatred if she had not first recognized herself as flesh. . . . [She] tortures this flesh condemned to the submission she detests without wishing, however, to dissociate herself from it” (354).

Beauvoir associates resistance and subversion with the girl’s “insincerity” and “denial”:

It is remarkable that in all those forms of behavior the young girl does not seek to 100 transcend the natural and social order, she does not aim to extend the limits of the

possible nor to work a transvaluation of values; she is content to display her revolt

within the bounds of a world the frontiers and laws of which are preserved. That

is the attitude often defined as “demoniac” . . . The attitude of the young girl is

essentially to be defined by the fact that, in the anguished shadows of her

insincerity, she denies while accepting the world and her destiny. (356-57)

The girl is incapable of critical authenticity or affect due to her “insincerity” “[f]or she does not choose, in spite of everything, really to repudiate her destiny” (354). Beauvoir locates girls’ negative stereotypes (“faults”) as well as their constructive responses (“special qualities”) in their

“denial.” She writes, “[T]he young girl accepts this situation which she is prone to flee from in a thousand inauthentic ways. She is vexatious in her faults, but sometimes she is astonishing in her special qualities. Both have one and the same source. Her denial of the world, her restless expectation, her nothingness, she can use as a springboard” (359). Beauvoir continues by outlining positive traits for girls, like social consciousness and critique, which ironically extend from girls’ awareness of their own divided state: “She can give weight to the revolts that set her against the world. She avoids the snares of overseriousness and conformism. The deliberate lies of her associates encounter her irony and clairvoyance. She feels the daily ambiguity of her position: beyond sterile protest she can bravely put in question official optimism, ready-made values, hypocritical and cheerful morality” (360). The girl can see through social ideology due to her own “lie to which the adolescent girl is condemned [in that] she must pretend to be an object” (357). In this sense, the girl is especially well positioned for social criticism and movement. Yet she cannot affect change or “protest” because, Beauvoir declares, “[o]f this liberty the adolescent girl can hardly do more than make negative use” (360). 101 Beauvoir concludes by folding these moments of girls’ critical insight back into the socially valued, feminine “special qualities” of girls, which she lists without critique: “Yet her inactivity can engender a precious receptivity; thus she can be devoted, attentive, understanding, affectionate. Rosamond Lehmann’s heroines are notable for their docile generosity. . . . The sensitive and generous young girl, receptive and ardent, is quite ready to become a woman capable of great love” (360-61). In sum, the girl’s point of view, or “attitude,” is contrary, insincere, and self- defeating, ultimately wanting and reaffirming heterosexual scripts. In retrospective, one must ask what form, if any, would the girl’s resistance have to take for

Beauvoir to recognize it as an authentic, subversive action? Perhaps it is because the girl’s behaviors are isolated from a collective political movement and appear as everyday personal gestures directed at the self that Beauvoir cannot conceptualize them as “feminist” or

“subversive.” These “micro” versus “macro” articulations reflect the discrepancy between second and third wave feminist discourses. Possibly because girls’ bodies, activities, and culture are considered trivial, even today, that they have no import for Beauvoir. Finally, when Beauvoir frames adult women’s emancipation through alignment with the male and rejection of the feminine, while defining the girl contrarily as becoming woman, her relational theory between two subjects omits the girl. Regardless, the girl represents multiple levels of subjugation, not the least of which is her presupposed “insincerity.”

Further inhibiting girls’ ability to act, resist, and transcend is what Beauvoir deems the immutable ontological fact of girls’ physical weakness compared to boys’ muscularity. Beauvoir theorizes that the girl’s “lack of physical power leads to more general timidity: she has no faith in a force she is not experiencing in her body; she does not dare to be enterprising, to revolt, to invent” as one who is “doomed to docility” (331). Beauvoir situates this biologist argument 102 within her larger theory of women’s gendered “situation,” arguing contrarily to “Let [the girl] swim, climb mountain peaks, pilot an airplane, battle against the elements, take risks, go for adventure, and she will not feel toward the world that timidity” (333). Diane Chisholm summarizes girls’ embodied situation as one where “Femininity is forced on the girl in ways that discourage and inhibit her ability to project herself into the world. To become woman proper, she must abandon play that calls on the forces of the body. Instructed and encouraged to embody feminine passivity, she is diverted from living her body autonomously and adventurously” (13).

Although Beauvoir adamantly attributes the major handicaps of becoming Woman to the existential and transcendable social conditions of women’s oppressive situation, she nevertheless locates girls’ powerlessness in, what she treats as, their essential physical weakness. Notably,

Beauvoir measures girls’ versus boys’ physical power by their capacity for violence. She writes,

“At about thirteen is the time when boys go through a real apprenticeship in violence, when their aggressiveness is developed, their will to power; and it is at just this time that the girl gives up rough games” (330).

Beauvoir treats violence as an expression of transcendence:

When a boy revolts against his father, against the world, his violence is effective;

he picks a quarrel with a comrade, he fights, he affirms his standing as subject

with his fists: in a word, he imposes himself upon the world, he transcends it. . . .

The combative boy regards minor injuries as insignificant consequences of his

positive activities . . . [A]ny attempt to reduce him to the status of object, the male

has recourse to his fists, to exposure of himself to blows: he does not let himself

be transcended by others, he is himself at the heart of his subjectivity. Violence is

the authentic proof of each one’s loyalty to himself, to his passions, to his own 103 will. (330-31, 354, 355)

Because “anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination,” “combative boy[s]” use their “fists” for “blows” and “injuries” in “fights” and

“quarrel[s]” with each other to express their subjective “revolt” against the authority of the

“father” or “world” (331). Conversely, Beauvoir cannot conceptualize girls in a physical fight, depicting them alternatively as “break[ing] glass, window-panes, vases not indeed to conquer fate, but simply by way of symbolic protest” (355). Girls cannot act or assert subjectivity because they lack both physical strength and strength in their convictions:

Such masterful behavior is not for girls, especially when it involves violence. . . .

The competitive attitude is almost unknown to them. Even her bursts of violence

rise from depths of resignation. Violent actions against herself or against her

surrounding universe always have a negative character: they are more spectacular

than effective. . . . It is a profound frustration not to be able to register one’s

feelings upon the face of the world. (331, 354)

Beauvoir continually undermines the girl’s articulations, rooting the girl’s behaviors in

“resignation” as “she protests by annulling.” Unable to achieve physical influence, the girl is destined merely to “destroy” and “[t]his is what fills her heart with revolt . . . She knows, or at least believes, that she is fettered and perhaps she wants to be; she can only destroy” (354-55).

Girls’ physical weakness disables their projection into the world, figured by their lack of phallic projection and penetration. Girl violence lacks force as flaccid and nonproductive, “destroy[ing]” rather than affecting change or penetrating the social sphere. According to Beauvoir, the girl receives the phallus as “an act of violence that changes a girl into a woman” because

“penetration is always a violation” (372, 383). Beauvoir’s biologist argument on girls’ physical 104 weakness extends from her sexual hierarchical motifs.

Girls’ physical aggression has been a major discourse in Girls’ Studies, with scholarship that re-sees many of Beauvoir’s themes on the interconnection between gendered “violence,”

“subjectivity,” “effective[ness],” and social “revolt.” Because “In 1940s France and in the metropolitan world at large, young women were forbidden to engage in bold physical activity,” the social stifling of girls’ physical expression for “passivity” transhistorically grounds an array of Girls’ Studies scholarship on the latter half of the 20th century (Chisholm 9). This scholarship demonstrates that parents and teachers now indirectly discourage and demonize girls’ aggressive physical and emotional expression. Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan recognized that girls grow up under “the tyranny of the nice and kind,” while Colette Dowling’s The Frailty Myth:

Redefining the Physical Potential of Women and Girls speaks of “girls overwhelming need to be small” and “perception of themselves as weak and ineffectual” “without the muscular heft and presumed physical assistance of the other half of the species.” Dowling argues that socialized behaviors that encourage girls to avoid rigorous exercise, eating, nutrition, and full-body movement have biological consequences for their vulnerability to chronic disease, bone-density and muscle-mass loss. Yet Dowling ultimately posits a similarly biologist argument to

Beauvoir’s, concluding that girls’ and women’s emancipation will be won by recognizing and fostering female physical strength that is on par with men’s.

Several Girls’ Studies scholars research the psychological “flight from self” that many girls undertake to avoid conflict in interpersonal relations in a “world that will not withstand girls’ attacks” (Cohen 51). In The Secret Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really Do, Sex Play,

Aggression, and Their Guilt, Sharon Lamb repeats Beauvoir’s major theme of “destr[uction],” reiterating that society treats girls’ aggressive expression as inappropriate and nonproductive. 105 But Lamb also argues that society has reframed this aggression as having the power to self- destructively terminate females’ connections to others and to love. She writes, “The fear of women’s destructive potential is learned early,” creating “Girls and women [who] fear that their anger could destroy others” and who operate under the notion “that to express anger threatens annihilation.” Leah Cohen notes how girls’ diminution is a “cultural myth [that] is insidiously internalized” when “the rebuke to girls’ aggression originates in the voices of others, [and] soon takes up residence in the girls themselves.” A common result of aggression driven underground is self-injury in girls.36 Jessica Benjamin notes that “Obedience, of course, does not exorcise aggression; it merely directs it against the self.” Beauvoir’s specific example of girls’ self- mutilation, and her more general categorization of girlhood “anxious” behavior, are clear depictions of girls’ anger and aggression. Girls are what Beauvoir refuses to directly term them even once in “The Young Girl” simply angry; they are maddened, not mad.

36 Another example of girls’ redirecting or sublimating female aggression is what Girls’ Studies scholars have termed “indirect or relational aggression” which includes girls’ group behaviors of gossiping, excluding, bullying, and withdrawing, causing relational and verbal injury rather than physical injury. These claims are an important backlash to years of feminist research claiming that girls and women are more nurturing, relationship-oriented, selfless, and contextually considerate than men, qualities Beauvoir essentializes in girls’ development. Beauvoir compares girls and boys emotional and relational qualities: she is more attentive to her feelings and so they become more subtly diversified; she has more psychologic insight than boys have, with their outward interests. . . . Being poorly integrated into the universe of humanity and hardly able to adapt herself therein, she, like a child, is able to see it objectively; instead of being interested solely on her grasp of things, she looks for other significance; she catches their special outlines, their unexpected metamorphoses. . . . Moreover, even when she chooses independence, she none the less makes a place in her life for man, for love. (360-61, 369 my emphasis). Because Beauvoir primarily discusses the girl as isolated and inwardly developed, girls’ relational violence remains outside her text’s considerations. The discovery of girls’ aggression in the psychological literature on gendered forms of adolescent violence resulted in a spate of highly celebrated books on the topic that identify the “meanness” in girls and proliferating school-based interventions aimed at rectifying the crisis. Notably, the popular media picked up on this Girls’ Studies scholarship when “TV and print further diffused the constructions of ‘mean girls’” to such an extent as to suggest a kind of pathological interest in re-packaging a serious social issue into a titillating entertainment product because, as Cohen notes, “[t]he whole notion of mean girls, the very phrase mean girls, is so sexy, so media-ready.” For psychological literature, see Bjorkqvist and Niemela Of Mice and Women, and Crick and Gropeter “Relational Aggression.” For books on relational aggression, see Simmons Odd Girl Out, Wiseman Queen Bees and Wannabes, White Fast Girls, Holiday Mean Girls, Meaner Women, Tanenbaum Slut! and Catfight, among others. The topic of “mean girls” made cover articles in The New York Times and Newsweek. Wiseman made a guest appearance on Oprah. Simmons’ scholarship was a featured story on Dateline. 106 Contemporary scholarship on girls also links expressing anger and aggression to emancipating subjectivity, a connection Beauvoir literalizes in the boy’s physical “fights [in which] he affirms his standing as subject . . . impos[ing] himself upon the world.” In Raising

The Vo es: The Po s of G s’ Ange , Brown argues that the constructive expression of anger is “intimately tied to self-respect, to the capacity to realize and author one’s life fully,” while Dana Jack similarly posits, in Beh nd he Mask: Des on and C ea v y n Women’s

Aggression, that “conflict is necessary for growth, . . . [and] healthy aggression is mandatory to the development of self and to positive connection.” Barbara Cohen traces the etymology of the term “aggression” to reveal its imbrication with emotional and sexual

“desire.” She writes:

It springs from twin impulses, aggression and desire, which are intertwined at

their root. The etymology of aggression is usually given as the Latin word

aggredi, which means to attack, but the more basic root, through the sanskri

griddhra, greedy, is the Aryan gardh, to desire. Aggression, in its marrow, is

about desire. This discovery, that aggression and desire are inseparable, turns out

to be the first clue. For they are forbidden to girls in equal measure. (x)

Based on a male phallogocentric definition of sexual biology, Beauvoir likewise denies girls’ physical and sexual aggression as, instead, “ris[ing] from depths of resignation.” If “anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination” (Beauvoir 331), externalized physical violence remains the only credible expression for Beauvoir.

However, data ranging from positive statistics on girls’ professional boxing to negative statistics on adolescent girl violence demonstrate that girls indeed “register [their] feelings upon the face of the world.” In 1994, a lawsuit filed by a sixteen-year-old girl in Washington and 107 backed by the American Civil Liberties Union lifted a ban on female boxing for the Amateur

International Boxing Association to adopt regulations recognizing women’s boxing. Currently

2,153 girls and women are registered with USA boxing, and thousands more are boxing in other countries. In her critical nonfiction memoir about girls’ and women’s professional boxing,

Without Apology: Girls, Women, and the Desire To Fight, Cohen locates the desire to box in her personal history of gendered adolescent socialization:

A long time ago I’d made a wrong turn and linked up freedom with abnegating

the body. Not such an usual mistake, not for women, not for girls. . . . [Boxing

meant] recognizing a kind of freedom I hadn’t known existed . . . that would force

me to question all I knew about being female. . . . “Why box?” It had to do with

anger. It had to do with size and femininity and power and control and resistance.

It had to do with self-esteem and confidence and mastery and self-respect. It had

to do with pressures to be pretty, and nice, and little, and sweet . . . all the tiny

moments of acquiescence and shameful surrender that mark girlhood. (14, 20, 50)

While Cohen saw herself as working against contemporary social “pressures” to be “pretty, and nice, and little, and sweet” by embracing and fostering her physical strength, other scholars conversely posit an increased appraisal of and media interest in girls’ physical aggression. In See

Jane Hit: Why Girls Are Growing More Violent and What We Can Do About It, James Gabarino lauds girls’ release from the obligation to be “ladylike” instead to seek achievement in an increasingly egalitarian society as a “new freedom . . . [that] can boost self-esteem and self- confidence.” He notes that girls’ increased participation in sports, girls’ advancement in school, and general societal shifts toward rewarding aggressive acheivement simultaneously support freer expression but also, in “an increasingly [media] toxic environment,” unwittingly result in 108 girl violence. Gabarino relates stories of girlhood physical bullying and abuse that confound the stereotypes of feminine behavior, highlighting a trend of physical, rather than relational, girl violence. Major increases in girlhood violent crime37 both “piqued the media’s interest” and became a troubling topic for Girls’ Studies researchers who want to support girls’ empowered embodiment as well as address the systemic and discursive abuse of and among these bodies

(Chesney-Lind 47). Regardless of the broad scope of research on girlhood aggression, it is clear that Beauvoir’s early definition of girlhood “passivity” ignores the manifold potential for girls’ phsyciality.

A final, major context Beauvoir uses to define the girl’s situation and deficient agency is the context of the narrative imagination. Beauvoir argues that girls operate in an imaginative narrative mode as an extension of their situation. By looking specifically at her treatment of girls’ writing in this context, telling contradictions arise in Beauvoir’s arguments that reveal her un/willingness to engage girl culture in her theorizations of women’s culture. Beauvoir begins by likening the girl’s situational anxiety to her “enrich[ment],” arguing, “The young girl, as we have seen, is inward, disturbed, the victim of severe conflicts, but this complexity enriches her, and her inner life develops more deeply than that of her brothers” (360). She argues that the girl’s inability to act, disengagement from the social sphere, and psychic dividedness result in her inward growth and turn toward narrativity. Beauvoir defines the girl’s separation from the “real world” as her relegation to the “imaginary world” (341-42), using the narrative imagination as a major definitional parameter of girlhood. The girl’s situation facilitates her narrativity in several forms, including “daydreaming,” “playacting,” “writing,” “sketching,” and even “lying” (341,

37 In the US between 1991 and 2000, girls’ arrests increased 25.3 percent while boys decreased by 3.2 percent. Girls’ referral to juvenile court grew with the number of delinquency cases involving girls increasing by 75 percent, compared to a 42 percent increase for boys. Arrests of girls for serious violent offenses increased by 27.9 percent, and arrests for “other assaults” increased by a whopping 77.9 percent (Federal Bureau of Investigation 221). 109 350, 357-58, 362). I will focus on Beauvoir’s emphasis on the girl as a writer because, Beauvoir posits after a lengthy summary of the girl’s deficiencies, “[s]he is . . . a ‘storyteller’” (357).

The girl’s inward turn originates in the sublimation of her psychosexual experiences.

Beauvoir flatly states, “The fact is that she is doomed to secrecy. At sixteen [she] has already been through painful ordeals: puberty, monthlies, awakening of sexuality, first desires, first fevers, fears, disgusts, equivocal experiences; she has stored all this up in her heart, and she has learned to guard her secrects carefully” (357). Girls’ Studies scholars Gilligan and Brown have argued that girls edit out their feelings and experiences, specifically to protect interpersonal relationships, creating “The mass movement of adolescent girls’ authentic voices ‘underground’ into protected spaces (such as private journals), a compromise state.” Beauvoir likewise highlights the girl’s diary and fiction writing as a private outlet for “truth[s] hidden” so that “[i]n its pages is inscribed a truth hidden from relatives, comrades, teachers, a truth with which the author is enraptured in solitude” (340). Beauvoir associates the girl’s situational inactivity and insignificance with her desire to validate the self in writing. Beauvoir explains that the girl

“wishes to pay homage to her whole self. Such is the purpose of those intimate diaries” (340).

The girl’s situation enables forms of narrativity, and

she may find poetry. Because she does not act she observes, she feels, she records.

. . . She rarely feels a bold creativeness, and usually she lacks the techniques of

self-expression; but in her conversation, her letters, her literary essays, her

sketches, she manifests an original sensitivity. The girl throws herself into things

with ardor, because she is not yet deprived of her transcendence; and the fact that

she accomplishes nothing, that she is nothing, will make her impulses only the

more passionate. Empty and unlimited, she seeks from deep within her 110 nothingness to attain All. (362)

Described in psychosexual language, the girl’s “nothingness” and “[e]mpt[iness] . . . deep within her” generate a “passionate” and limitless “ardor” to “throw herself” into “impulses” that result in an “original sensitivity” through creative output. Beauvoir writes of the girl’s eroticized creativity that, “when she takes possession of it, she also proudly takes possession of herself

[which is] often depicted in [literary] juvenile orgies, as in Sido” (362). Beauvoir conflates the girl’s creative inclination with her psychosexual “feel[ing]” as “an orginial sensitivity.”

Beauvoir’s rhetoric links adolescent sexual self-consciousness to issues of selfhood, agency, and power of expression through the image of the girl “author [who] is enraptured in solitude.”

Carter Cram notes that Beauvoir herself turned to reading and writing to explore her repressed adolescent embodiment. His biographical study notes how,

As a child, Beauvoir was unable to explore her feelings of sexual awakening and

was limited by the puritanism of the mores of her family. . . . As a result, she

learned to transfer the pleaure received from reading, writing, and learning to her

unfulfilled appetite for knowledge about her body’s growing desires. Reading and

learning thus served as the crutches which helped her traverse a lacuna of wisdom

about her body.

Girls’ writings feature prominently in “The Formative Years,” often alongside and in dialogue with women’s literature. This inclusion methodologically validates girls’ input into their own self-conception. It is common for Beauvoir to devote several pages in a row solely to excerpts of girls’ written commentary collected in academic scholarship, often with five to ten concurrent, uninterrupted quotes (302-03, 313-15, 323-24, 343-45). A sample of Beauvoir’s prefacing to these excerpts follows: 111 In his L’Ame de ’ado es en , Mendousse quotes many similar letters . . . A girl of

twelve who kept her diary until she was twenty wrote the following inscription. . .

Another girl, cited by Mendousse, avows in her diary some less elevated

sentiments. . . . Others give notice. . . In her book L’Ado es en , Mme Evard also

collected many of these intimate effusions. . . . The following letter written by a

girl of fifteen and cited by Helene Deutsch is characteristic. . . . Thus one

schoolgirl writes to her friend . . . Here are some of their replies given him by

young girls concerning their knowledge of sexuality.

(302-03, 313-15, 323-24, 340, 343-45)

Quotes from girls’ writings proliferate in this section. Likewise, “The Formative Years” initiates an “unusually high” amount of women’s writing, fiction especially, which Moi suggests, validates women’s literary history:

Particularly in Book 2, subtitled “Lived Experience,” Beauvoir draws on an

unusually high number of novels, autobiographies, and letters by women. No

writer is quoted more than Colette, but Virginia Woolf’s voice is also always

present. The literary material adds energy, vitality, and validity to The Second

Sex, and knowledge too. . . . Beauvoir’s understanding of literature and why we

read it is exceptionally productive for feminists and others who believe that

literature− and the canon too− must include voices of women, members of

minority groups, and other excluded groups. (“What?” 195)

Although she does not mention girls’ writings, Moi’s argument for the “add[ed] . . . knowledge” from literary forms in this section is transferable to girls. Bridging her contexts of girlhood narrativity and women’s authorship, Beauvoir comments that some famous women authors 112 maintain the psychosexual creative interests of their girlhood. For example, “Women as diverse as Emily Bronte and Anna de Noailles have known such fervors in their youth and retained them throughout life” (363). She highlights that other notable women sustained and developed their adolescent creativity, arguing, “The richness and strength of their natures, in favorable circumstances, have enabled some women to go on as adults with the passionate designs of adolescence” (364). Beauvoir’s own adolescent reading inspired her self-conception as a future writer. Elizabeth Fallaize notes that in Beauvoir’s girlhood, Beauvoir imagined herself as one day writing for an adolescent audience through a fictional representation of her own adolescence:

“Beauvoir’s childhood ambition to become a writer stemmed from her own early reading of fiction. At 15 she read, in English, Eliot’s Mill on the Floss . . . and vowed that one day ‘other adolescents would bathe with their tears a novel in which I would tell my own sad story’” (12).

Beauvoir’s comment on fictional autobiography suggests interplay between the real and representational in adolescence. Considering these contexts, I briefly note that a rhetorical trend in Beauvoir’s analyses is her juxtaposition of quotes by real girls with quotes from representational girls in literature by women. Beauvoir moves back and forth between literary characters’ voices and real girls’ voices and writings, sometimes without transition as if substituting one for the other. While this trend, on the one hand, aligns the girl author and woman author in complimentary ways, this trend also doubly positions girls in the textual realm, portraying them as psychically preoccupied with imaginative narrativity, and as narratively constructed subjectivities. An example of her alternating between fictional quotes of girls and factual quotes by girls occurs across several pages in “The Formative Years” when she introduces “Carson McCullers’s delightful book The Member of the Wedding” with a lengthy quote from girl character “Frankie’s” point of view as an example of young girls’ ignorance of 113 sexual mechanics (300). Beauvoir then theorizes about “children discover[ing]” and naively witnessing the sexual interactions of others, moving into a quote from a real girl “cited from Dr.

Liepmann’s Jeunesse et sexualite” (301). One paragraph later she excerpts seven more quotes from different girls in this study, then theorizes “that even clear instruction would not solve the problem” of explaining eroticism to girls (302-03). Positing that erotic knowledge must be felt,

Beauvoir concludes this paragraph with three literary excerpts depicting pubertal girls’ embodiment: “Such is little Emily, whom Richard Hughes describes in The Innocent Voyage . . .

Even the tranquil Tessa in Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph felt this strange distraction

. . . This disturbing moment is described at length in Carson McCullers’s book The Member of the Wedding” (303). Interestingly, Beauvoir uses fictional representation to support her point that girls gain erotic knowledge through their maturational bodies rather than through tales told or hinted at by adults and friends. Somehow the literary character’s growing “awareness of contacts, tastes, odors that were formerly indifferent her” is more real than a real girl’s testimony to these experiences (303). Organizationally, Beauvoir appears to frame the flurry of seven quotes from real girls within McCullers’ textual explication, with a section break occuring after

McCullers.

A more compressed example arises when Beauvoir quotes Marie Bashkirtsev’s diary.

Bashkirtsev is a famous Ukranian girl author and artist who began keeping a journal at the age of thirteen on her personal account of the struggles of women artists in the late nineteenth century until her death at twenty-five. With the girl author and woman author in conjunction, Beauvoir quotes Rosamond Lehman’s novel, then Bashkirtsev’s girlhood diary, and moves without interruption to parallels with two more literary characters, then back into a conclusive statement about Bashkirtsev. My abbreviated excerpt shows that the content thematizes girlhood self- 114 construction and representation within Beauvoir’s organization that likewise alternates the real and representational:

In Rosamond Lehmann’s Invitation to Waltz we see Olivia discover in the mirror

an unknown figure . . . It was a portrait of a young girl in pink. All the room’s

reflected objects seemed to frame, to represent her, whispering, “Here are You.”

. . . This confusion is manifest in Marie Bashkirtsev. . . She writes, “I am my own

heroine.” She wants to become a singer . . . she wants to be loved . . . “You will

be dazzled by my splendor and you will love me. You are worthy of only such a

woman as I hope to be.” We find this same ambivalence again in Natasha of War

and Peace: That morning she had returned to her favorite mood- love of, and

delight in, herself. “How charming that Natasha is!” she said again . . . Katherine

Mansfield has also described, in Prelude . . . “If I looked in and saw myself I

would be rather struck,” thought she. (338-39)

Beauvoir layers literary voices, blurring the line between Bashkirtsev’s factual account and women authors’ fictional accounts. According to Moi, Beauvoir uses numerous literary characters to depict a variety of women’s experiences rather than to totalize experiences to represent one Woman. I believe that considering girls in Moi’s argument further diversifies the

“different experiences and different women” she argues is Beauvoir’s intention. Moi writes,

“The multitude of literary voices in The Second Sex are there to show both that different situations give rise to different experiences and that different women may react differently to the same situation. Beauvoir is not setting forth general truths but rather attempting to convey another woman’s way of seeing the world and analyze its implications of that way of seeing”

(“What?” 196). Likewise, girls offer different ways of “seeing in the world” which problematize 115 an assumedly fixed category of, and “general truths” about, “women” for which Beauvoir has been criticized. Working against the “presumption that a girl child is a psychosocial being who is made social” rather than a “being located in and produced through” various social histories and ideologies, Girls’ Studies scholars urge that re-seeing the girl results in “femininity itself becom[ing] a highly contested construct that is resisted, appropriated, and assumed in different ways by different girls” (Bettis 9). Yet despite foregrounding girls’ “ways of seeing” in girls’ letters, diaries, autobiographies, stories, and representations in fiction, Beauvoir nonetheless criticizes girls’ writings.

While Beauvoir both praises and uses girls’ writings throughout Sex, she simultaneously defames girls’ composition as “foolishness,” “sill[iness]” and “narcissism” (341). Although

Beauvoir cites famous women authors and their works throughout this section as examples of social critique and transparency, she does not locate that disruptive potential in girls’ writings.38

Beauvoir breaks from her portrait of the deficient girl who is “rarely” creative and “usually” lacks self-expression, suggesting that the girl “records” and “author[s]” an “original sensitivity” in “her letters, [and] her literary essays,” among other forms. Yet Beauvoir attributes scenes of narrativity and self-authorship to the “cult of the self” (336). The “cult of the self” is a form of exaggerated girlhood self-interest coming out of “a basic confusion in her eroticism” in that the girl “does not distinguish the desire of the man from the love of her own ego. [For example] This confusion is manifest in Marie Bashkirtsev” (338). Beauvoir connects female narcissism with writing: “This cult of the self is not expressed in the young girl through adoration of her physical person only; she wishes to possess and pay homage to her whole self. Such is the purpose of those intimate diaries in which she can freely pour her soul . . . [and the purpose] of her little notebook” (340). In addition to linking the girl’s narrativity to her sexuality, Beauvoir also

38 Eisenhauer also notes this difference (“Subject” 41). 116 frames the girl’s narrative imagination as a form of escapism: “From this narrow and paltry existence she makes her escape into dreams. She has always liked to dream, and now she gives herself up to this bent more than ever; she masks an intimidating universe under poetic clichés;

. . . she tells herself silly fairy stories. She sinks so often into such foolishess because she has no hold upon the world” (341). Beauvoir declares that girls’ writings and narrative modes are “silly fairy stories,” “clich s,” “foolishness” and “narcissistic.” She concludes a paragraph trivializing girls’ writings by, ironically, quoting from a girl’s diary as evidence of girls’ predisposition to imagination. The insert reads, “‘At school I would sometimes escape from the subject being explained and take wing into the land of dreams . . .’ writes a young girl” (341 ellipses in orig).

By classifying girls’ writings as “silly fairy stories,” “clich s,” “foolishness” and

“narcissistic,” Beauvoir overlooks the politics of girls’ writings as cultural engagement, self- expression, and empowerment. In her book Girls Make Media, Mary Celeste Kearney discusses

American girls’ diary writing in the 19th century and onward in relation to contemporary forms of girls’ cultural production. She writes, “As diary writing continued, girls not only recounted their fantasies and gave accounts of their lived realities . . . girls also drew from the melodramatic language and romantic fantasies of their favorite films, novels, magazines and songs within the pages of their diary” (33). Kearney suggests that, in this way, girls’ diaries illustrate girls’ interactions with and relationship to popular culture. Instead, Beauvoir treats girls’ narratives as largely outside of culture. They are an escape from “reality” into fantasied

“dreams” that demonstrate how the girl has “no hold upon the world.” By framing girls’ narratives as “escapist” and self-involved, Beauvoir sees no reciprocity between girls’ creativity and culture. Instead, Girls’ Studies scholarship treats “girls as producers of culture, not merely consumers,” as in Alison Piepmeier’s Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, which re-sees 117 “youth scholarship that has by and large positoned boys as agents and girls as onlookers”

(Piepmeier 7). Brumberg’s The Body Project supports the seriousness of girls’ diaries as historical documents about embodiment. She writes, “Although many people regard the literary remains of ordinary girls as silly or worthless . . . they contain private ruminations with a great deal to say about life.” As a document of daily realities, Brumberg continues, “Old diaries are a national treasure, providing a window into the day-to-day routines of family, school, and community. They also recapture the familial cadences of adolescent emotional life, and they provide authentic testimony to what girls in the past considered noteworthy, amusing, and sad, and what they could or could not talk about.” By reducing girls’ writings into an expression of egocentrism, Beauvoir theorizes them as an erotic confusion of love for the female body and female image intended for the male. Instead, Girls’ Studies scholar Catherine O’Sullivan values girls’ writings as a form of self-authorship against heteronormative identity construction for the male. Arguing that “diaries developed as sites of resistance, self-exploration, self-expression, and self-construction,” O’Sullivan posits that the page of a diary “became a space where an individual’s identity was (re)actively conceived” (60).

Girls’ Studies collections of girls’ essays and poetry depict writing as empowerment and collective voicing, not reductive narcissism. In Girl Power: Young Women Speak Out! Personal

Writings From Teenage Girls, Hillary Carlip theorizes that “every girl who takes a pen to paper and speaks her word, allowing her emotions to surface, is committing a courageous act of self- empowerment” (3). By doing so “[t]hrough writing, not only are demons freed and mockeries banished, but through self-expression, girls come into their power” (Carlip 3). Indeed, the girl’s

“letters, her literary essays, [and] her sketches” that Beauvoir lists now compose the materials which, late in the twentieth century, girls compile, bound, and exchange as underground feminist 118 tracts in the forms of “zines.” Noting that “[g]rrrl zines’ informality can be deceptive,” Piepmeier analyzes the “intellectual agendas and underpinnings” of these written, illustrated, and collaged documents between girls to show that “these documents not only reveal girlhood on the ground but also are a site for the development of a late-twentieth-century feminism” as “sites for the articulation of a vernacular third wave feminist theory” (4). By dismissing the cultural, collective, and resistant potentials of girls’ narrativity, Beauvoir suppresses girl culture in her theory of women’s culture.

In addition to classifying girls’ narrativity as narcissistic, escapist, and erotically confused, Beauvoir characterizes the girl’s creative narrative imagination as a dangerous mode that threatens to “envelop the whole existence” (341). In doing so, she makes a major distinction between her definitions of “the girl” and “the woman,” aligning the girl with the “imaginary world” and the woman with “real world” (342). This distinction others the girl from the woman, in that women have a grasp on reality and mental/emotional control. The girl’s “intense imaginative life,” supported by her writings, can become “confus[ed] . . . with reality” where the girl resultingly has “no hold upon the world.” Beauvoir explains:

In this way the adolescent girl, avoiding real experiences, often develops an

intense imaginative life, sometimes, indeed, confusing her phantasms with reality.

Helene Deutsch describes the significant case of a young girl who imagined an

elaborate relationship with an older boy to whom she had never even spoken. She

kept a diary of affecting scenes, with tears and embraces, partings and

reconciliations, and wrote letters, never sent, which she herself answered. All this

was evidently a defense against real experiences that she feared. This is a

pathological extreme, but the process is normal. (348) 119 Although Beauvoir qualifies this example as a “pathological extreme,” she often uses exaggerated, abnormal cases of girlhood to argue normal developmental trends. She follows her critique of girls’ diary writing with an example of a girl who was insitutionalized after her girlhood penchant for daydreaming became delusional. Beauvoir writes, “Daydraming may become morbid and envelop the whole existence, as in the following case: Marie B., an intelligent and dreamy child, entering puberty at fourteen, had a psychic crisis with delusions of grandeur. Annoucing that she was Queen of Spain, she assumed haughty airs, sang, issued commands. For two years this was repeated at each menstruation” (341). This lead to the girl’s

“hosptializ[ation]” “[i]n an asylum for good” where, as an adult, she reenacts her girlhood activities by “playing with dolls and dressing up . . . in her imaginary world,” remaining caught in what Beauvoir deems the uniquely girlhood activity of “daydreaming [which] envelop[ed] the whole existence” as an escape from the “reality” of physical maturation (341-42). The case study closes by reinforcing the theme of narrativity when the now adult patient “had many such stories to tell, each an invented life that she lived in imagination.” Beauvoir follows this case study by immediately normalizing the patient’s extremist mode as common for girls: “We can see that this morbid daydreaming was of a kind to assuage the narcissism of the young girl who feels her life inadequate and fears to face the realities of existence. Marie B. simply carried to an extreme a process of compensation which is common to many adolescent girls” (342). Beauvoir uses an

“extreme” example of “common” “process” for girls. When the girl’s compensatory imaginative daydreaming grows or, more to the point, continues into adulthood, then Beauvoir classifies the mode as abnormal.

Beauvoir distinguishes between the girl and the woman based primarily on behaviors that distance the female from the “imaginary.” Woman has moved beyond divisive introspection and 120 creative escape, unlike the girl. Beauvoir writes, “there is on the whole a great difference between the tender bud of fifteen and the ‘big girl.’ The latter is ready for reality; she hardly moves any longer on the plane of the imaginary; she is less divided against herself than formerly” (365). Using quotes from young women in their late teens, Beauvoir tracks girls’ movement out of “painful turmoil,” “wondering,” and being “disturb[ed]” into “calmness” and

“unconcern”:

Marie Bashkirtsev writes at about eighteen: “The more I advance toward the old

age of my youth, the more unconcerned I become. Few things now disturb me and

everything used to disturb me.” Irene Reweliotty has this to say: . . . “It is no

longer the trembling, wondering happiness of the fifteen-year-old.” . . . These

confessions of a nineteen-year-old-girl have almost the same ring: “Formerly, ah,

what a conflict between a mentality that seemed incompatible with the present

century and the call of this century itself! Now I seem conscious of a certain

calmness. Each new and grandiose idea that occurs to me, instead of causing a

painful turmoil, an incessant destruction and reconstruction, is marvelously

adapted to what is already in my mind. . . . Now I move insensibly from

theoretical ideas to life as it is, without a break.” (365-66, ellipses in orig)

Moving out of “conflict” and “incompatib[ility]” with the world, the young woman has come to terms with her role as Woman and “in the end accepted her femininity” (366). Conversely, when the girl considers “the real world, she tries to forget it” because she “fears to face the realities of existence” (341). Beauvoir thematizes this transition as moving out of psychic turmoil, away from a “disturb[ed]” “wondering” “mentality” and “mind” into reconciliation between “ideas to life as it is.” The girl represents lack of mental/emotional control and preoccupation with 121 imagination as Other to the woman’s mental and social integration into reality. Notably,

Beauvoir concludes the three excerpts with a comment that implies the young woman’s relationship to philosophy. The philosophical process of “destruction and reconstruction” of

“each new grandiose idea” and “theoretical idea,” previously causing a “painful turmoil” for the girl, is now “marvelously” bridged between “mind” and “life” for the young woman. The woman is capable of philosophizing because of her connection to “life as it is” and because of her

“calmness” and “insensib[ility]” as the figure of Woman. The girl’s “mentality” is consumed by

“new and grandiose idea[s],” but is not disciplined enough to apply them. In this context, one may additionally interpret Beauvoir’s girl/woman distinction in relation to the writer/philosopher distinction that was a preoccupation for her. “Given that Beauvoir always defined herself as a writer rather than a philosopher,” Beauvoir sensed a gendered hierarchy in these disciplinary modes, deeming Sartre instead as the preeminent philosophical mind (Moi “What?”189). If

Beauvoir considers either philosophy or writing to be the “adapt[ing]” of “theoretical ideas to life,” then her definition of the girl and the woman may hold symbolism about her sense of self in these fields. In sum, the girl’s existence on “the plane of the imaginary” must end for her to become a woman, and this ending, for Beauvoir, occurs most literally through intercourse as the introduction of the reality of the penis. In her discussion of sexual initiation, Beauvoir theorizes that intercourse creates a temporal division that removes the girl from the past, her girlhood, and her imagination: “To become a woman is to break with the past once and for all. But this particular transition is more dramatic than any other; not only does it create a hiatus between yesterday and tomorrow; it also tears the young girl from the world of imagination wherein much of her life has unfolded and throws her into the real world” (380). Leaving “the world of imagination,” through intercourse and aging, marks the teleology of the girl. 122 The “Psychosomatic” Pubertal Body, Madness, and Disability in the Teen Girl

Beauvoir defines the girl’s pubescent, maturational body as a “hysterical body” that simultaneously contains “genuinely organic disorders” resulting from its changing biology as well as “psychosomatic” properties resulting from the “anxiety” of its situation (332). Beauvoir classifies both menstruation and the girl’s interpretation of menstruation as a “heavy handicap” which “drives her half mad,” thematizing girlhood through mental disability and comparing girls to institutionalized, psychiatric patients (308, 332). Importantly, Beauvoir extends her disability rhetoric to her general definition of girlhood, deeming the girl’s contrary, divided nature of both wanting and rejecting womanhood also as a type of “neurotic condition” (316). Specifically, the girl’s divided behavioral agency that both contests the social order but “does not aim to extend the limits of the possible” is likewise a “neurotic” expression (357). The girl’s inability to make an authentic feminist expression is a sign of her “psychasthenic aberration” (357). Beauvoir configures the girl’s body and “attitude” both as a type of, what I’m calling, madness (356-57,

329-30). Although feminist criticism has historically analyzed the motif of madness as symbolism for adult women characters and writers, I argue that Beauvoir defines girlhood through madness. Although Beauvoir occasionally makes reference to women’s bodies as

“hysterical,” she hyperbolizes this state in the girl as “normal,” and defines the woman as largely reconciling this position (348). Instead, the girl is in a unique position where she “ma[kes] worse” those pubertal changes by her “upsetting discovery” of them, thus contributing to the

“hysterical body” in ways that the woman cannot. Madness is Beauvoir’s cumulative motif for

Othering the girl.

When “the crisis of puberty supervenes at about the age of twelve or thirteen,” the girl’s maturing body and her response to it demonstrate the “disorders of puberty” (306, 332). 123 Although Beauvoir denies girls agency to affect change in the world, the girl’s psychology largely affects her body. Beauvoir conflates the girl’s psychology and physiology, basing her analysis on “One of the characteristics of female psychology [a]s [being] the close relation between the endocrine secretions and nervous regulation” which creates a “reciprocal action”

(332). According to Beauvoir,

The body of a woman− particularly that of a girl− is a “hysterical” body, in the

sense that there is, so to speak, no distance between the psychic life and its

physiological realization. The disorders of puberty are made worse by the

upsetting effect their discovery has upon the young girl. Because her body seems

suspect to her, and because she views it with alarm, it seems to her to be sick: it is

sick. We have seen that in fact this body is delicate, and there are genuinely

organic disorders arising in it; but gynecologists agree that nine tenths of their

patients are imaginary invalids; that is, either their illnesses

have no physiological reality at all or the organic disorder is itself brought on by a

psychic state: it is psychosomatic. (332-33)

Corresponding to her concept that the girl operates on “the plane of the imaginary,” Beauvoir argues that the girl’s “psychic life” is as real as her “physiology” and furthermore affects that physiology “by a psychic state.” The girl’s interpretation of her physical changes is powerful enough to “psychosomatic[ally]” materialize social pathology in her body as “illnesses.” Girls exacerbate their physiology, Beauvoir determines: “The horror this [physical maturation] inspires has repercussions throughout her organic structure and intensifies its disturbed and painful condition” (332). Beauvoir’s discussion does not distinguish these additional “illnesses” from normal physical development. There is no differentiation between the “organic disorder” 124 and it being “made worse” into another ailment, like stress-induced “disorders” such as depression or hives, for example. Instead, Beauvoir institutes a categorical madness as a motif for the pubertal body and for girlhood in general, classifying “this body” as “disorder[ed],”

“sick,” and eventually “handicap[ped],” offering examples of pubertal girls that are medical

“patients” and “imaginary invalids.” If most girls’ “illnesses have no physiological reality at all,” whereas the “organic disorder [puberty] is itself brought on by a psychic state,” then Beauvoir appears to suggest that girls initiate their own menstrual pains, or menstruation itself, through their anxiety (my emphasis). This slippage locates “genuin[e] organic disorders arising” from the pubertal body but, more importantly, from the “upset” and “alarme[d]” pubertal mind.

Listing the biological changes of puberty as essentially negative and disabling, Beauvoir nonetheless concludes that the girl’s “attitude” shapes “the disorders of puberty.” Yet Beauvoir states that girl’s mental attitude experiences “psychic difficulties often” which “may [result] in a state of semi-lunacy” and lead to her isolation, hospitalization, or institutionalization. Beauvoir lists the girl’s debilitating biological changes:

True enough, puberty transforms the young girl’s body. It is more fragile than

formerly; the feminine organs are vulnerable, and delicate in their functioning; her

strange and bothersome breasts are a burden . . . The imbalance of her hormones

creates a nervous and vasomotor instability. Menstruation is painful: headaches,

overfatigue, abdominal pains, make normal activities distressing or impossible;

psychic difficulties often appear; nervous and irritable, a woman may be in a state

of semi-lunacy. . . . These facts are of great importance, but what gives them

weight is woman’s attitude toward them. (329-30)

In this list, the pubertal body’s physical ailments transition into mental/emotional ailments. 125 Beauvoir’s physical descriptors can also be applied to the mental/emotional realm in that the female mind has been historically classified as “fragile,” “vulnerable,” “delicate,” “strange,”

“nervous,” “[un]stabl[e],” and “distress[ed].” But concerned foremost with her argument on women’s situation, Beauvoir reinforces that “woman’s attitude” in her situation “gives weight” to biological “illnesses.” She concludes her biological list on girlhood with this larger context of the “condition of woman”: “It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body. It is clear that if the biological condition of woman does constitute a handicap, it is because of her general situation” (332-33). The girl’s “anxiety” about caring for her menses and maturing appearance “constitutes a handicap” in a social situation that gives a “cast of shame

[to] her whole body” (308, 332). Through a mental disability motif, Beauvoir argues, “It is because of this psychic state induced by her menstrual slavery that it constitutes a heavy handicap” (332).

Beauvoir offers several specific examples of girls developing mental pathologies in response to puberty that lead to their isolation in the home, a hospital, or their mind.

Exemplifying how “the young girl at about this stage frequently develops a neurotic condition,” a teen “patient” is profiled by Beauvoir as “[a]n example that strikingly illustrates these anxieties” (316). This girl’s pathologies originate in her menstruation: “Molly was fourteen when she began to suffer from psychic disorders. . . . From her first menstruation her anxiety about becoming pregnant and dying in childbirth became so severe that after a time she refused to leave her room, and now she sometimes stays in bed all day . . . She lies awake listening to noises, and fears that someone is trying to enter the house; she has fits of weeping, she daydreams, and she writes poetry” (316-17). Repeating her themes of girlhood escapism and narrativity, Beauvoir connects the girl’s fear and lacking knowledge of menstruation to 126 prolonged isolation, both mental and geographical. This isolation may take the form of the girl’s chosen or forced medicalization. Similarly, “Marie B., an intelligent and dreamy child, entering puberty at fourteen, had a psychic crisis” that “[f]or two years was repeated at each menstruation” and which lead to her “hosptializ[ation]” “[i]n an asylum for good” (341-42).

Beauvoir also highlights anorexia as the girl’s response to physical maturation when she is

“frighten[ed] to become flesh and show her flesh” (308). Beauvoir describes how “distaste is expressed by many young girls through the wish to be thin” in that “they no longer eat” and

“have vomiting spells” while “[o]thers become pathologically timid” about “their weight” (308).

Suggesting a widespread “pathological” ailment among “many girls” and “others,” Beauvoir profiles “a typical case of this kind” in an anorexic girl’s story that devolves into womanhood

“psychoses”: “From such beginnings psychoses may now and then develop. A typical case of this kind is described . . . Nadia, a young girl of wealthy and intelligent family, was stylish . . . A precocious puberty added to her troubles: ‘since men like plump women, she will remain thin.’ . .

. The appearance of menstruation drives her half mad . . . when she was eighteen she imposed on herself a severe regime [of] hunger. . . . She left her family and hid in a small apartment, never going out; there she lives most of her time in the dark” (309). Beauvoir normalizes these

“pathological” cases as ubiquitous in girlhood, indeed, defining girlhood. The girl’s anxiety- ridden “psychic state” characterizes her being.

In addition to classifying the girl’s reciprocal body and psychology as “hysterical,”

Beauvoir aligns her foundational definition of girlhood with madness. Because the “attitude of the young girl is essentially defined by the fact . . . of her insincerity,” Beauvoir draws from the principal “trait that characterizes the young girl and gives us the key to most of her behavior” by likening the girl’s disingenuous social critique to madness. The girl’s failure to make a feminist 127 statement is a sign of her madness. Although Beauvoir does not juxtapose biological commentary with her discussion of the girl’s “attitude,” she nonetheless frames this attitude within women’s passive sexuality (i.e., genitalia) to essentialize how the girl contrarily “wants sexual possession” but “revolts against her desires” (321). Beauvoir notes that “insincerity” “is the dangerous game of adolescent feminine sexuality” when girls’ “disobedience, their defiance of society, has a masochistic side” that seeks “the danger of being caught” in order to, “in the shame of it all, sense herself an object” (355). The girl’s self-defeating critical gestures that induce her own objectification parallel “the hysterical paralytic patient[’s] fears” which brings on her own “paralysis”:

All the perverse and guilty behavior patterns of girls have this same significance.

. . . It is not surprising to find that refusal to become an object leads to making

oneself an object: the mechanism is common in all the negative obsessions. In a

single reaction, the hysterical paralytic patient fears paralysis, desires it, and

brings it about: cure comes only in ceasing to think about it, just as with

psychasthentic tics. (355-56)

The girl concretizes her “parlay[zed]” social position as object through her disingenuous agency and her “perverse” “negative obsession” with objecthood. The girl can only “cure” her psychology by “ceasing to think about it,” a decision that forecloses feminist consciousness- raising in girlhood. Beauvoir continues by using pathological, phobic language to classify girls’ acts of resistance, “relat[ing] the normal young girl” to “neurotic” patients and defining her through a “fundamental dissimulation”:

The depth of her insincerity is what relates the normal young girl to these neurotic

types. Manias, tics, plots, perversities− we may find neurotic symptoms in her 128 because of that ambivalence of desire and dread which I have carefully pointed

out . . . that inextricable confusion of revolt and complicity which marks the

psychasthenic aberrations. It is remarkable in all those forms of behavior the

young girl does not seek to transcend the natural and social order, she does not

aim to extend the limits of the possible nor to work a transvaluation of values; she

is content to display her revolt within the bounds of a world the frontiers and laws

of which are preserved. That is the attitude often defined as ‘demoniac,’ which

implies a fundamental dissimulation . . . The attitude of the young girl is to be

defined essentially by the fact that, in the anguished shadows of her insincerity,

she denies while accepting the world and her destiny. (356-57)

Presupposing the girl’s artificial agency and resistance, Beauvoir offers a damaging characterization of the “normal” girl as exhibiting “[m]anias, tics, plots, perversities” and

“aberrations.” The girl’s unwillingness to “extend the limits of the possible” or affect change in

“the natural and social order” makes her a “demoniac” figure. The girl’s inauthentic feminist statements are signs of her madness. In sum, Beauvoir positions the girl in opposition to feminism through her “hysterical body” and “attitude.”

While Beauvoir’s exaggerated motif of madness is part of a larger project of othering the girl from a feminist identity and a cohesive subjectivity, it nonetheless mirrors contemporary interests in and treatments of the interplay between the girl’s biology and mental well-being in her situation. In fact, recent scholarly research on the social and neurological maturation of girls reveals ground-breaking findings, including a major increase in girls’ “anxiety” from childhood to teen age and neurological restructuring that several scholars colloquially liken to “craziness”

129 and “mental illness.” Drawing from a major 2010 study39 indicating that hormonal differences between the sexes make women “a touch more biologically inclined to anxiety then men,”

Taylor Clark responds in his editorial “Nervous Nellies: Girls don’t start out as anxious as boys, but they usually end up that way” by noting additional evidence,40 reporting an exponential increase in gendered anxiety in the teen years which correlates to gender socialization periods.

Considering women’s and girls’ “situation,” he writes, “While women are indeed more fretful than men on average right now, this difference is mostly the result of a cultural setup—one in which major social and parenting biases lead to girls becoming needlessly nervous adults. In reality, the idea that women are ‘naturally’ twice as anxious as men is nothing more than a pernicious illusion” (emphasis in orig). Author of Nerve: Poise Under Pressure, Serenity Under

Stress, and the Brave New Science of Fear, Clark responds to these biological fear studies by citing evidence that

in the first few months of infants’ lives, it’s boys who show greater emotional

neediness. While girls become slightly more prone to negative feelings than boys

at two years (which, coincidentally, is the age at which kids begin learning gender

roles). Up until age 11, girls and boys are equally likely to develop an anxiety

disorder. By age 15, however, girls are six times more likely to have one than boys

are. (emphasis in orig)

The increased likelihood of girls developing an “anxiety disorder” amazingly supports

Beauvoir’s characterization from decades earlier. Clark responds to the association between anxiety and teen girlhood with his own research on “parenting disparities,” “social forces that

39 See Bangasser, et al. 40 See McGee, et al. 130 seem bent on making her anxious about beauty,” and further research41 showing females “are consistently seen—and even see themselves—as being more emotional” against males exhibiting the same level of emotion (emphasis in orig). With attention to girlhood socialization, he notes,

“there’s quite a lot of evidence that girls who exhibit shyness or anxiety are reinforced for it, whereas boys who exhibit that behavior might even be punished for it.” Encouraging anxiety in teen girls, while not identical to Beauvoir’s normalizing anxiety in teen girls, nonetheless shows transhistorical dialogue about anxious girlhoods.

Conclusion

Beauvoir’s philosophy on women’s condition requires the separation and discussion of girlhood as an integral life stage. Yet her philosophy simultaneously requires sublimation of girlhood’s particulars and identity categorization for a theory of woman’s “becoming.” Beauvoir defines the girl not in herself but as relative to the woman, applying her gender theory of the

Other as an ageist theory for othering the girl. Beauvoir others the girl from full subjectivity, sexual embodiment, and feminist identity which are the realms of women. Relying on negative discursive stereotypes of the girl as passive, indecisive, and insincere, Beauvoir deploys a social construct “Girl” in order to theorize a distinction between the construct “Woman” and biological women. The tension in Beauvoir’s negotiation of girl culture and subjectivity in her project theorizing women’s culture and subjectivity is most evident in her treatment of the girl’s lacking agency. The girl lacks both physical and mental agency as an extension of her psychosexual situation. The girl lacks physical and mental strength in her convictions as one whose liminal, divided psychology extends from her liminal subject position between the more salient categories of childhood and womanhood. Because she cannot commit to or reject “becoming

Woman,” the girl’s contrary nature precludes her feminist expression. Rather, the girl occupies a

41 See Barrett, et al. 131 heightened psychological realm “on the plane of the imaginary” away from “the real world” where she is preoccupied with narrative creativity and anxious interpretations of her pubertal body and social role. The girl’s “anxiety” psychosomatically shapes her pubertal body, eclipsing full embodiment for a pathological “hysterical” body formed by emotional interpretations.

Beauvoir also locates the girl’s passivity and hysterics in the pubertal body’s sexual biology, though she portrays the girl’s situational attitude as superceding biology. Thematizing the girl’s body, attitude, and definitional parameters through, what I’m calling, “madness,” Beauvoir others girlhood through mental instability and disability. I argue that her motif of “anxiety” actually mirrors Sex’s theoretical unease in its use of the girl in constructing the feminist subject.

The Second Sex enacts epistemological tension regarding the girl’s placement in feminist theory by representing the girl’s biological and mental “disease” as symbolizing a feminist theoretical “unease.” I argue that Beauvoir’s portrayal of the girl’s madness is so severe as to represent a sweeping, categorical attempt to other the girl from feminism, thus symbolizing a latent anxiety about the girl’s potential. This anxiety is also apparent in the overall paradoxical treatment of the girl in the text, and in discrepancies within topics. For example, in her treatment of girls’ writings, Beauvoir’s tension arises in her waffling on the merit or limitation of girls’ writings. Prolifically using and praising girls’ writings seems to animate and validate girls’ voices. These writings, in tandem with women’s literature, create a rich tapestry of female voices and expressions. However, Beauvoir conversely critiques the merit of girls’ writings by framing them as escapist, damaging, narcissistic, and silly. Furthermore, Beauvoir’s placement of the girl in a representational and imaginative realm ironically mirrors her own methodological treatment of the girl through literature and social construct. To conclude, Beauvoir’s own contrary, divided treatment of the girl as both explaining and opposing the woman reveals a textual “anxiety” 132 about feminism’s subject.

133 Chapter Three: Celie’s Psychodrama: Neuroscience, Teenage Cognition, and the Epistolary Form in The Color Purple

I say, Write. She say, What? I say, Write. Alice Walker, The Color Purple (18)

The Color Purple’s epistolary form enacts a psychodrama between two sisters, Celie and

Nettie. These characters figure two aspects of one artistic imaginary that is split into divergent selves including the self which experiences, and the self which escapes, sexual violation in girlhood. A fictional psychodrama is a “narrative strategy [that] involves splitting and doubling the psyche of the artist into different figures, protagonists, or characters whose lives follow different plotlines but whose psyches are in some sense reassembled by the reader” (Friedman

35). The undeliverable and unanswered letters between the two sisters do not enable a dialogic exchange but, instead, render an impossible correspondence that abstracts the act of writing.

Undermining the principles of order, linearity, and coherence of a developmental narrative plotline, the letters do not portray a teleological evolution from youth to adulthood. Rather, the letters demonstrate the psyche’s fracturing by sexual trauma into static and dynamic selves who enact opposing aesthetic and thematic modes as one composite representational psychology. One self figures a static state of girlhood passivity, sensation, and literalization as one existing in a perpetual present; the other self figures a dynamic state of activity, defiance, and analysis as one focusing on the future. I argue that these selves are figurations of “the girl” and “the woman,” and that these selves correspond to aged cognitive modes in neuroscience. While Celie’s experience has been critically analyzed through her multiple identity categories, exemplified in her husband’s censure “You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman” (206), I will introduce age as central to Celie’s experience of her gender. I analyze how girlhood operates as the key 134 variable in Celie’s epistolary psychodrama with her sister/“double” through the novel’s neurological and ideological profiles of girlhood.

Using new neuroscientific research on the teenage brain, I link Celie’s girlhood representation and the thematic and stylistic characteristics of her letters to the concept of neurostructural “executive functioning” in teen cognition. Recent studies show that teenagers’ brains have difficulty with “executive functions” which include projecting goals, predicting causation, cognitive flexibility, abstract thinking, selecting relevant sensory information, recalling memory, and processing speed. As a girl, Celie demonstrates problems in every one of these categories. Conversely, Nettie demonstrates adult, higher-order executive functions even in her girlhood. Because studies further show that trauma intensifies teens’ lack of executive functioning, I use a study researching executive function specifically in youth who experienced familial sexual and physical abuse to highlight Walker’s stylistic rendering of Celie’s “executive dysfunction” against Nettie’s more mature letters. When I argue that there’s a marked correspondence between Celie and Nettie’s divergent mental processes to new findings on teen neurology, I am not implying these characters have a neurocognitive existence. Rather, I am suggesting that when Walker sought to explore girlhood sexual violation and mental survival, she imaginatively constructed a girl character that corresponds with newfound neuroscientific models. My point is not to analyze Walker’s brain either, but to shed light on how her construction of Celie’s character in the novel and, by extension, the girl writer, can be newly understood. Furthermore, I argue that this neuroscience is reflexively nuanced by its representation in the form of a narrative “psychodrama” which treats “the girl” as an ideological, discursive, and aesthetic construct.

Following my neurological reading, I analyze how Celie and Nettie negotiate the social 135 signifiers “girl” and “woman” as an ideological binary that is recapitulated through their letters. I am drawing from Girls’ Studies epistemology that seeks “an understanding of the ‘girl’ not simply as something that someone is (a question of being and ontology), but as something that someone is discursively constituted as” (Eisenhauer 79). Girls’ Studies investigates the social significations of the term “girl” as a fluid discursive construct across bodies performing girlhood, as well as physiologically experiencing it. In the novel, I argue that the stepfather’s abuse and separation of the sisters are contingent on his perception of Celie destabilizing girlhood gender norms and of Nettie reinforcing them. He perceives Celie as the hypersexual “woman” and

Nettie as the virginal “girl,” the opposite identity categories of Walker’s neuroscientific portrayal. Under the rule of the father, the sisters are forced to operate within a Madonna/whore complex that cannot account for teens’ liminal, maturational body and developing sexuality. I argue that Walker counters the stepfather’s classifications by presenting Celie’s trauma as an imposed “womanhood” of rape, childbirth, and maternity from which she immediately moves into a form of “innocent” girlhood where she no longer menstruates and her developmental properties are temporarily halted. This is a reverse movement from a “normal” maturational trajectory that Nettie follows of an “innocent” girlhood with a non-violated, pubescent body transitioning into a sexualized/sexually procreative “womanhood.” Nettie’s guaranteed developmental future is prefigured psychically during her girlhood. These two selves come closer together as the novel progresses when Celie develops mentally, emotionally, and sexually, and Nettie’s life becomes less dynamic, concluding in her geographical “return” to her past. By reuniting the traditional gender classifications of “the girl” and “the woman,” Walker interrogates the role of patriarchal orders in the artist’s formation. Focusing on scenes from the sisters’ adolescence, I argue that Walker’s epistolary novel demonstrates developmental 136 figurations of “the girl” and “the woman,” which I support with neuroscience, and that these figurations respond to ideological binaries of “the girl” and “the woman” negotiated as aspects of the artist, which I support with a theory of narrative “psychodramatic” form. In sum, this chapter explores how narrative represents the artistic imaginary alongside how recent science has rewritten the neurological imagination.

Narrative Frames: The Epistolary, Psychodrama, and Neuroscience

While much criticism treats Celie’s letter writing and communal bonding as effecting self-actualization through her collective identity,42 no one entertains both Celie’s and Nettie’s letters as portraying the fractured, multiple components of one creative imaginary as they are overdetermined by differing social and psychological conditions. Alice Walker abstracts Celie and Nettie’s letter writing to represent one composite imaginary as a narrative “psychodrama.”

Nettie’s letter suggests this material abstraction and psychic combination, reading, “Dear Celie,

It has been a long time since I had time to write. But always, no matter what I’m doing, I am writing to you. Dear Celie, I say in my head. . . . Dear, dear Celie. And I imagine that you really do get my letters and that you are writing me back: Dear Nettie, this is what life is like for me”

42 Analyses of Celie’s collective identity emphasize how the female community at large intersects with and expands her sense of self, creating Celie’s singular narrative voice that represents a myriad of individuals’ stories and a once silenced canon of black women’s authorship. Shanyn Fiske summarizes how Walker’s narrative forms convey Celie’s plural and relational identity: “With its epistolary structure and layered first-person narrations, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple unfolds a symphony of voices at once discrete and intermingled. The novel’s inclusion of so many individual stories makes it difficult to tell whether these narratives are enclosed within Celie’s account of her life or whether Celie’s story is part of a larger whole. This formal destabilization of a dominant narrative emphasizes that an individual cannot be considered apart from the matrix of his or her relationships and that it is through integration into a collective identity that he or she defines the boundaries of his or her own being” (150). While I draw from critical consensus on Celie’s pluralized self, my analysis considers Celie and Nettie alone as a form of split psyche with identifiable mental/emotional components, rather than a community with multifarious and indistinct contributions to her development. Moving away from the argument that Celie “fuses with a complex and contradictory group [such that] her power is articulated in and continued through a community,” I offer a more psychoanalytical, and neurological, reading “of the multiple individual” in which the novel’s sisters “encompass opposites and can represent both sociological debate and psychic interplay between boundaries and boundlessness” (DuPlessis 142). For scholarship that addresses Celie’s development of a communal identity through female bonding, see, for example, Chambers; Cheung; Fifer; Lenhart; McKenzie; Shelton; and Tucker.

137 (144). The letters between the two sisters portray an imperfect correspondence in their complete mailing, chronological receipt, and full comprehension by readers of different literate and experiential scopes. Furthermore, Celie’s act of composition is never portrayed, suggesting that, even though she does write, her composition is not contained within one finite characterization, tangible location, or set of writings. bell hooks outlines the absence of the scene of writing, noting how “[t]here is no description of Celie with pen in hand, no discussion of where and when she writes. She must remain invisible so as not to expose this essential contradiction that as a dehumanized object she projects a self in the act of writing even as she records her inability to be self-defining. Celie as a writer is a fiction” (466). I want to suggest that this treatment of the epistolary form reads as a “psychodrama” between an ever-present sister, Celie, and always- absent sister, Nettie, such that The Color Purple “marks the clearing of debris through the embrace of absence. Insofar as it directs attention to the creative process, Walker’s text tends towards the realm of metafiction. It is indeed an anti-story” (Hall 90). The Color Purple demonstrates a psychodrama involving

a self-conscious splitting of the artistic into two or more characters whose

different ways of being represent aspects of a single artist’s psyche which exists

only at an imaginary metalevel outside the space and time of the novel. The

characters are both fully distinct people living within the space/time frames of the

novels and fragments of a whole to be combined in the mind of the reader.

(Friedman 136)

During the course of the novel the two sides of the psyche come closer together as Celie reclaims her agency during a parallel recuperation of her sister’s lost letters. Walker notably introduces

Nettie’s first (girlhood) letter only one letter after Celie has a semiotic and cognitive collapse 138 when discovering that Albert has concealed them. While critics have focused on Celie’s absent voice in this section (she repeatedly emphasizes that she “can’t speak”), they overlook how

Celie’s absent thought creates a necessary narrative space for Nettie to enter. Celie describes her overwhelming rage and resistance towards Albert in meditative rhetoric: “I watch him so close, I begin to feel a lightening in my head. . . . I know what I’m thinking bout, I think. Nothing. And as much of it as I can. . . . I don’t know nothing, I think. And glad of it” (123). Cognition is overdetermined in this scene as Celie repeats “know” and “think” while simultaneously negating that ability. I suggest that Celie’s “lightening in [her] head” is a kind of cognitive evacuation so that Nettie can enter with her story as a figuration of a different side to Celie’s psychology.

When mounting rage and confrontation replace Celie’s prolonged acquiescence in this climactic scene, Nettie concurrently surfaces as a narratee as a textual sign of Celie’s reintegration of her “double” self. This self is immediately empowered and resistant as shown in Nettie’s first girlhood letter which reads, “Dear Celie, the first letter say, You’ve got to fight to get away from

Albert” (126).

The Color Purple’s sisters, through their letters, represent two sides to the psyche split by trauma into different aspects of developmental girlhood. One side is associated with stronger agency, self-determination, intellectual scope, and growth. The other side is associated with the abject, conceptual limitation, and stasis. These sides figure “the girl” and “the woman.” By contrasting a linear plotline, the letters do not offer a chronology from youth to adulthood but demonstrate the psyche’s fracturing by girlhood sexual trauma seen through metonymic representation in scenes of creative being. Valerie Babb links this function to the epistolary form’s treatment in the novel, explaining how “[f]or most of The Color Purple, neither sister receives the other’s letters. The capacity of writing as a communicative link is thus 139 overshadowed by its capacity to lend stasis to human experience so that it can be assessed”

(115). Falling within the definition of a psychodrama, the demarcated letters “lend stasis” to the sisters’ polarized experiences to portray “momentary thematizations or performative enactments that take shape in relation to specific attributes of the artist that each character figuratively represents” (Friedman 134). I classify the sisters’ figurations as “girlhood” and “adulthood” and their “specific attributes” through the polarized pairs of violated and protected; body and mind; abject and subject; presence and absence; sensory and abstraction; language and theory; lyric- poetic and prose; present and future; girl and adult. Based on social and aesthetic orders, these polarizations demonstrate how the “novel resorts to a psychodramatic narrative strategy to explore the borders between oppositional ways of being and to suggest the desire of the modern artist figure for some sort of hybridic combination of the two” (Friedman 149). Celie and

Nettie’s letters’ stylistic features dramatize figurations of “the girl” and “the woman” to represent “symbiotic facets of the modern artist who combines excess with lack, presence with absence” (Friedman 149). Such a reading is in keeping with this dissertation’s argument that “the girl” is an essential figuration in different women’s artistic imaginaries. As a psychodramatic

“anti-story,” The Color Purple’s “splitting of the artist into a pair introduces a Doppleganger effect that interrogates [t]he nature of the artist and the role that social determinations play in her formation” (Friedman 145).

To introduce the sisters’ oppositional modes, I turn briefly to the beginning of the novel where Celie’s sexual violation contrasts Nettie’s sexual protection. This disparity reads like a psychic bifurcation, demonstrated in Celie’s early reflection, “I lay there thinking about Nettie when he on top of me, wonder if she safe” (12). Celie repeatedly substitutes as victim for sexual and marital abuse intended for Nettie. She offers herself for sex to their stepfather in place of 140 Nettie, noting in a letter, “I ast him to take me instead of Nettie while our new mammy sick” (7).

Their stepfather offers Celie for marriage instead of Nettie, paralleling the sisters in identical phrasing, “I can’t let you have Nettie. . . . But I can let you have Celie” (7). In this marital negotiation, which reads as a mock slave-selling scene, the stepfather emphasizes Celie’s sexual availability by suggesting to her buyer, “You can do everything just like you want to Celie. . . .

Fact is, I got to git rid of her. . . . But Nettie you flat out can’t have. Not now. Not never” (8).

Nettie is the sister who will “never” be had sexually, while the “fact” of Celie’s existence is her sexual slavery. Celie repeats this distinction when imagining Nettie as an untouchable, rescuing force once Albert takes Celie away as his bride. Celie’s wording reads as double-entendre: “Dear

God, It took him the whole spring, from March to June, to make up his mind to take me. All I thought about was Nettie. How she could come to me if I marry him and he be so love struck with her I could figure out a way for us to run away” (7). Celie imagines that Nettie, the

“lov[able]” self, can distract from her, the abject self, allowing time to plot an escape that saves them, written in rhyme as “a way for us to run away.” During Nettie’s stay, Nettie repeats

Albert’s verbal advances to Celie, compliments that conflate the girls yet redirect embodiment to

Celie alone. Celie notes this transferal, “She tell me, Your skin. Your hair, Your teefs. He try to give her a compliment, she pass it on to me. After a while I git to feeling pretty cute” (17).

Nettie’s resistance to intercourse with Albert necessitates her exit when the topic of her separate sexual expectation causes the girls’ separation. Albert requires that Nettie leave which he declares while “in bed” with Celie:

He say one night in bed, Well, us done help Nettie all we can. Now she got to go.

Where she gon go? I ast.

I don’t care, he say. (17) 141 Celie and Nettie’s few scenes of communication in the novel prefigure the text’s psychodramatic split of one imaginary into static and dynamic selves. Nettie’s remarks are active and future-directed, calling for exertion of agency and resistance against oppression, while

Celie’s remarks are passive/static, situated in the present by focusing merely on survival. Their conversation reads like one individual debating the possibilities available to the self:

Don’t let them run over you, Nettie say. You got to let them know who got

the upper hand.

They got it, I say.

But she keep on, You got to fight. You got to fight.

But I don’t know how to fight. All I know how to do is to stay alive. (17)

Because “Nettie never give up,” she figures the proactive self, while Celie remains inactive in a perpetual present as one who “stay[s] alive” and “stay[s] where I’m told” (10, 17, 21). Brenda

Smith notes that, because “Celie’s focus is on survival,” Celie is incapable of projecting future avenues since “[h]er experiences have been limited to the trauma that she suffered at the hands of the men in her life, and she is unable, at this point, to imagine any other possibilities for herself”

(8). Comparatively, Brita Lindberg recognizes Nettie’s activity and resistance, listing how

“Nettie is from early on a quiet rebel. . . . Nettie shows initiative and spunk [as she] opposes Pa,”

“runs away from Pa’s oppressive household,” “forcefully refuses [Albert’s] advances,” and

“encourages Celie not to let her husband’s mean children tyrannize her.” Even when comparing the sisters’ girlhood epistolary tones, “readers can detect a positive and confident tone in

[Nettie’s] letters, which is quite different from Celie’s hyperaffective letters” (Zhou 300).

Charles Proudfit notes that the sisters’ stylistic voices also diverge into mental and emotional registers: “Nettie’s intellectual and educated mind contrasts vividly with the emotional intensity 142 of her victimized older sister” (30-1). Yet because Celie’s letter writing is not directly reciprocated, Celie partly assumes Nettie is dead, explaining, “I think about Nettie, dead. She fight, she run away. What good it do? I don’t fight, I stay where I’m told. But I’m alive” (18, 21).

Paradoxically associating the assertion of one’s subjectivity with the death of the self, Celie

“don’t say nothing” and chooses passivity to, instead, write her subjectivity into being (21). In the moment of the sisters’ climactic separation, Walker’s prose alternates voice and subject in a rhyming, poetic rendering of the psychodrama that will ensue. Their departure aligns Celie with

“Writ[ing]” or the linguistic/lyric, and Nettie with broad philosophical query:

I say, Write.

She say, What?

I say, Write. (18)

Once Celie finds Nettie’s letters as an adult, she re-visions her girlhood stasis of existing in a perpetual present, instead, into an empowering assertion of her presence in the here and now. She later declares, “I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I’m here” (207).

I will connect the sisters’ oppositional modes to neuroscientific findings on executive functions in teen cognition. Collectively, executive functioning “involves both externally- oriented acts of choice, active-initiative, and volition, and internally-oriented processes of self- regulation” (Baumiester 129) through “actions we perform to ourselves and direct at ourselves so as to accomplish goal-directed behavior, and the maximization of future outcomes” (Barkley

304). As the agent of executive function, “the self is responsible for acts of volition . . . of being active instead of passive” (Schmeichel et al 33). Yet executive function development is delayed in teenagers, revealed by “functional neuroimaging studies [which] have shown that adolescent 143 development is typically characterized by immature prefrontal cortex activity (important for cognitive control and intelligent behavior) and enhanced responses in subcortical affective systems (suggesting an intensification of emotional experience)” (Crone 829). Furthermore, in cases of physical and sexual trauma, “current studies demonstrate a relationship between familial-trauma exposure and basic executive functioning” (DePrince et al, [itals in orig.] 359).

Because my reading is concerned with a character in the abnormal circumstances of rape, forced marriage, and battery, I outline the scientific portrait of “normal” neurological development to provide background for Celie’s intensified impairment of these executive function behavioral categories. Her intensified lack of executive functioning aligns her with findings in a specialized neuroscientific study on youth trauma. Neither sister, I argue, corresponds neatly with the

“normal” maturational trajectory new neuroscientific findings offer. Rather, the sisters hyperbolize different developmental trajectories of this state into figurations of “girlhood” and

“womanhood,” with Celie’s “girlhood” portraying scientific findings on abuse cases’ increased executive “dysfunction.” Conversely, Nettie appears more “mature” or adult than Celie because she demonstrates no problems characteristic of teenage cognition and is, rather, advanced in her neurological profile. Overall, The Color Purple’s epistolary form and plotline disrupt “normal” psychological and physical development, thus necessitating specialized scientific studies on abnormal teen development in conjunction with stylistic analysis on narrative form.

Neurological Reading of Girlhood: The Teen Brain, Executive (Dys)Functions, and Celie and Nettie’s Cognitive Divergence

Recent neurological research on “the basic changing structure of the teenage brain [t]hat is very, very new” concretizes adolescence as a “profound . . . critical period of development” and rewrites the scientific narrative of teen cognition (Strauch xiii, 59). Neuroscientists are revealing “ground-breaking studies [that] have come together to blow apart our old view of the 144 adolescent brain” because “[w]hat they found was nothing short of astonishing, and it completely rewrote our understanding of the teen brain” (Bradley 6). In her book The Primal Teen, Barbara

Strauch relays how “new imaging studies are revealing for the first time patterns of brain development that extend into the teenage years” (13). These studies reveal newfound growth and changes in teens’ prefrontal cortexes, gray matter, white matter, and progressive myelination.

Teens’ neurological expansion and restructuring demonstrate corresponding behavioral limitations involving the prefrontal cortex’s “executive functions.” Overall, these neurological and behavioral patterns are different from both childhood and adulthood, thus suggesting a significant developmental girlhood. Neuroscientist Daniel Weinberger explains how new changes in the adolescent brain rewrite “long-held” scientific narratives on brain growth by situating the teen as developmentally unique from the child and the adult:

Remarkable changes occur in the brain during the second decade of life. Contrary

to long-held ideas that the brain was mostly grown-up “fully cooked” by the end

of childhood, it is now clear that adolescence is a time of profound brain growth

and change. In fact, the brain of an early adolescent in comparison to that of a late

adolescent differs measurably in anatomy, biochemistry, and physiology.

[Furthermore] teenagers are not the same as adults in a variety of key areas

[involving executive functions]. Such limitations reflect, in part, the fact that key

areas of the adolescent brain, especially the prefrontal cortex that controls many

higher order skills, are not fully mature until the third decade of life. (1)

These studies further suggest that teens’ “massive” neurological changes may even surpass other life periods previously held to be the most developmentally significant. Strauch writes, “in the last few years, Giedd and other scientists have found that the adolescent teen brain undergoes a 145 massive remodeling of its basic structure, in areas that effect everything from logic and language to impulses and intuition” such that “[m]ost scientists working in this area today think that the changes taking place in the brain during adolescence are so profound, they may rival early childhood as a critical period of development” (xiii, 13).

Furthermore, scientists are also discovering notable sex differences in these changes regarding the brain’s process of myelination, a gradual coating of the synapses, which occurs earlier in teen girls than teen boys. As researchers “found that girls’ brains were generally myelinating faster than boys” (Strauch 54), neuroscientist Francine Benes argues that these differences are significant enough to suggest gender behavioral disparities and “could be part of the teenage gender puzzle. It may be one reason why young girls often seem to attain emotional maturity before boys” (Benes, qtd. in Strauch 54). In sum, neurologist Robert McGiven reviews, the brain “areas still being built during the teenage years” correspond to delays in “executive function” behaviors from a “relative inefficiency in frontal circuitry of the adolescent brain as it undergoes a remodeling its growth spurt and pruning of synaspses” (73). Neurologist Peter

Huttenbocher concludes of these electrical and behavioral “limitations” that “while we should expect teenagers to begin to perform some higher level thinking, we also shouldn’t be surprised if they have trouble” with a variety of skill sets formed in executive functioning (Huttenbocher, qtd. in Strauch 20).

Neurological findings that teens possess delayed executive function skills from brains newly revealed as “not finished” but “raw, vulnerable . . . and in flux” (Strauch 8) are relevant to

The Color Purple in that Celie and Nettie possess divergent cognitive capabilities that align with

“executive functions” and “executive dysfunctions.” Nettie demonstrates advanced “executive functions” including cognitive flexibility, abstract thinking, retaining and recalling memory, 146 predicting causation, and projecting goals. These align her with the neurological profile of a young adult in her girlhood and demonstrate how her letters figure adulthood. Conversely, Celie demonstrates problems with each of the executive functions that Nettie possesses and with additional ones including processing speed, selecting relevant sensory information, and interpreting social signals. Celie’s marked problems with these functions portray her confusion, distractibility, difficulty in dividing attention, and difficulty in concentrating which align her not merely with the “normal” developmental paradigm of teen neurology, but with “executive dysfunctions.” For example, “executive dysfunctions” can lead to diagnoses of learning disabilities like ADHD. Cognitive studies on youth further show that executive dysfunctions can result from sexual, physical, emotional, or brain trauma, each of which Celie experiences.

While I will trace specific executive function capabilities and impairments in specific scenes of girlhood, I first foreground two major categories of executive function involving foresight and self-awareness as ever-present thematic modes in which the sisters diverge.

Overall, stasis and lack of future-projection thematize Celie’s teen years while calls to action and advancement thematize Nettie’s girlhood. Celie summarizes her perpetual focus on survival in the present, stating, “All I know how to do is to stay alive” (17 [my emphasis]). Conversely,

Nettie thanks her education and teacher specifically “for keeping alive in me the desire to know” and to be future-directed toward intellectual/personal knowledge and growth, not simply practical survival (132 [emphasis in orig]). Barkley defines the wide variety of executive functions collectively as those “actions we perform to ourselves and direct at ourselves so as to accomplish goal-directed behavior, and the maximization of future outcomes” (304) with

DePrince seconding how these “functions are critical to goal-directed behavior” (353). As such, the very first letter Celie reads of Nettie’s shows Nettie choosing strategic times to write and 147 mail her letters so that Celie might receive them. She explains, “I only write at Christmas and

Easter hoping my letter get lost among Christmas and Easter greetings, or that Albert get the holiday spirit and have pity on us. There is so much to tell you that I don’t know, hardly, where to begin” (117). Nettie is able to project scenarios and “maximize future outcomes” through present behavior. Instead, the first time Walker juxtaposes the sisters’ letters in conjunction on one page, Celie cannot project future scenarios: “Dear God, Now I know that Nettie alive I begin to strut a little bit. Think, When she come home us leave here. Her and me and our two children.

What they look like, I wonder. But it hard to think about them. I feels shame” (148). Walker emphasizes Celie’s cognition through the synonyms “know,” “wonder,” and “think,” yet concludes by redirecting rhetoric to the emotional realm with the term “feels.” In “Five

Components of Executive Function,” Chris Dendy highlights this projection and planning as a collective area of executive functioning, outlining how problems with executive functions in teens “[a]ffects their sense of the future” causing teens “to live in the present− focus on the here and now,” making them “less likely to talk about time or plan for the future.” As a result, teens

“have difficulty projecting lessons learned in the past, forward into the future (limited foresight)

[and] have difficulty preparing for the future.” Celie’s “sense of the future” is affected since she cannot envision what leaving Albert’s home, or her children’s appearance, would look like.

In addition to Celie’s primary method of “focus[ing] on the here and now” as a teen who only wants to “stay alive,” a second major behavioral mode in Celie’s girlhood is a lacking sense of self. Dendry outlines the fourth key collective area that is compromised in teens as a

“diminished sense of self-awareness” where an executive function deficit “[a]ffects their sense of self-awareness.” Michael Bradley highlights findings on the specific brain area that affects teens’ self-awareness: 148 [C]ontrary to previous thinking that the brain is completely developed by age five,

they saw that throughout the teen years and into the twenties, substantial growth

occurs in a brain structure called the corpus collosum. The corpus collosum is a

set of nerves that connects all the parts of the brain that must work together to

function effectively. This set of “wires” is critical to things like intelligence,

consciousness, and self-awareness. . . . all gifts to us from [the corpus collosum],

gifts your kid hasn’t yet received. (6-7)

Celie’s lacking “self-awareness” is thematized throughout as “innocence” to knowledge of her own body, circumstances, and personhood. Celie and Nettie’s girlhood characterizations correspond largely to normal delays in these two major components of executive function.

Because neuroscientific research connects abuse, depression, stress, and anxiety to the impairment of teens’ executive functions, I turn now to scenes where Celie is under duress, and often directly references that duress, as instances of her impaired cognition. These scenes conversely highlight Nettie’s advanced executive functioning. Celie and Nettie’s divergent cognitive abilities are most evident in the issue of schooling. The sisters’ opposing sexual experiences affect their access and receptivity to education and resulting capacity to learn, conceptualize, and “mature” neurologically. The stress of Celie’s appending marriage impairs her executive functions by blocking her ability to learn and memorize Nettie’s academic lessons.

Celie narrates the thwarted pedagogical scene:

The way you know who discover America, Nettie says, is think bout cucumbers.

That what Columbus sound like. I learned all about Columbus in the first grade,

but look like he the first thing I forgot. She say Columbus come here in boats call

the Neater, the Peter, and the Santomareater. Indians so nice to him he force a 149 bunch of ‘em back home with him to wait on the queen. But it hard to think with

gitting married to Mr. ____ hanging over my head. (9)

When “[r]esearch shows that depression and stress both have major impact on executive functioning,” one study points specifically to “anxiety” as impairing executive functions and even mimicking Attention Deficit Disorder (Eberle). Martha Denckla explains, “Anxiety can mimic ADHD/executive dysfunction, causing too much dopamine to flood the brain, causing a

‘disconnect’ in the frontal lobes’ central executive function from other brain functions” (Denckla qtd. in Eberle). Celie herself connects anxiety to her learning problems, stating that “it hard to think with gitting married to Mr. ____ hanging over my head.” Nettie persists in teaching Celie basic reading, “spelling,” and “world,” yet Celie interjects into the lesson her anxiety about how

Nettie’s future may be similar to her own. Praising Nettie’s instructional efforts, she explains how Nettie is

Helping me with spelling and everything else she think I need to know. No matter

what happen, Nettie steady try to teach me what go on in the world. And she a

good teacher too. It nearly kill me to think she might marry somebody like Mr.

___ or wind up in some white lady kitchen. All day she read, she study, she

practice her handwriting, and try to git us to think. Most days I feel too tired to

think. (16)

Anxious about her sister’s limited possibilities to the extent that “it nearly kill [her],” Celie cannot “think” about academic lessons. Walker frequently repeats the term “think” in this passage, and in the teaching scenes in general, thematizing cognition in this girlhood section that invites a neuroscientific reading.

Studies of teens’ executive functioning frequently address recognizing and strategizing 150 learning disabilities in elementary schooling, such as in the lessons Celie cannot memorize.

William Stixrud summarizes:

Problems with skills associated with executive functioning are responsible for a

variety of learning disabilities in reading, writing, math skills and content area

learning. For example, dysfunctions in working memory, an important aspect of

executive functioning, can cause difficulties in reading comprehension.

[Furthermore] Executive dysfunction can also cause difficulties using mental

strategies involved in memorization and retrieval. (qtd. in Eberele)

Because “working memory, [is] an important aspect of executive functioning,” defined as

“(holding facts in mind while manipulating information and accessing facts stored in long-term memory),” an executive function impairment results in “limited working memory capacity”

(Dendy). Correspondingly, Celie specifically “forgot” her lesson on the discovery of America, despite Nettie’s attempt to appeal to Celie’s lyricism by providing a term that rhymes with

“Columbus.” Celie notes, “I learned all about Columbus in the first grade, but look like he the first thing I forgot” (9). She concludes the lesson by underscoring that she cannot memorize or retain scholarly information, a problem she notably attributes to her “brain.” Walker writes, “I feel bad sometime Nettie done pass me in learnin. But look like nothing she say can git in my brain and stay” (10).

Walker’s prolonged attention to the girls’ divergent educational abilities also reveals

Celie’s problems with abstract conceptualization, as demonstrated by Celie’s inability to grasp

Nettie’s geography lesson. Celie explains, “She try to tell me something bout the ground not being flat. I say, Yeah, like I know it. I never tell her how flat it look to me” (10). Strauch points to scientific findings on expansive thought, highlighting how “the section of the brain that Benes 151 found is still myelinating during adolescence is an integral part of a circuit that connects quick reactions to historical, contextual thought” (54). Celie quickly agrees with Nettie’s lesson though she does not “know it,” as the circumscribed scope of her thinking parallels the limited scope of her life. This normal delayed developmental state in teens is further impaired in those suffering from stress disorders. If we read Celie’s multiple traumas as creating a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, her depiction aligns with studies which show that “Children with PTSD performed more poorly on measures of attention and abstract reasoning (a dimension of EF

[executive function])” (Fishbein 300). Rather than reasoning abstractly, Celie relies on the sensory, actual appearance of the land, of how it “look to me,” colloquial phrasing that connotes thought. Unable to retain the topics of Nettie’s early lessons, Celie cannot negotiate historical, global, and continental concepts which become Nettie’s domain when “Nettie’s letters serve the thematic purpose of broadening The Color Purple’s geographical and political horizons to include Africa and to connect that continent to Celie’s little corner of the American South”

(Warhol 185). Summarizing their divergent experiential modes, Charles Proudfit writes,

“Nettie’s intellectual and educated mind contrasts vividly with the emotional intensity of her victimized older sister” (30). Governed by literalization and sensation, Celie frequently uses the term “feel” (“feels shame,” “feel bad,” “feel too tired,” “Feel a lightening,” “feeling pretty cute”) to express her emotionally “intense” state. Correspondingly, neuroscience shows a reduction of teens’ capacity for “intelligent behavior” and an “intensification of their emotional experience”:

“functional neuroimaging studies have shown that adolescent development is typically characterized by immature prefrontal cortex activity (important for cognitive control and intelligent behavior) and enhanced responses in subcortical affective systems (suggesting an intensification of emotional experience)” (Crone 829). Celie succinctly summarizes how her 152 emotional and physical modes trump her intellectual mode, concluding, “Most days I feel too tired to think.”

Continuing her girlhood inability to reason abstractly, Celie likewise resists broader

“world” concepts in adulthood like before when “Nettie steady try to teach [her] what go on in the world.” Celie receives her first compliment in adulthood, a compliment expanded to encompass a greater theory of women in the world. But Celie resists this theoretical depersonalization and concludes with a descriptive image of her present, satisfied scene of small human solidarity. Walker writes,

All womens not alike, Tobias, [Shug Avery] say. Believe it or not.

Oh, I believe it, he say. Just can’t prove it to the world.

First time I think about the world.

What the world got to do with anything, I think. Then I see myself sitting there

quilting tween Shug and Mr. ____. Us three set together gainst Tobias and his fly

speck box of chocolate. For the first time in my life, I feel just right. (57)

Celie’s rhyming, cyclic phrasing “First time I think about the world. What the world got to do with anything, I think” demonstrates her resistance to broad, abstract concepts that she nonetheless “feel[s]” in her immediate mise-en-scene. Rather than consider the expansive concept of women’s differences across the world, she more narrowly assesses her particular location against others in the room. Celie’s sense of space and place is not as sweeping as

Nettie’s transnational evaluations. For example, as an adult, Nettie suggests to the Olinkas that global changes for women are occurring and can be transculturally adopted, arguing, “The world is changing, I said. It is no longer a world just for boys and men” (160). The sisters continue their girlhood aesthetic and experiential modes into adulthood as oppositional aspects of the artist. 153 Because Celie’s extreme, specific forms of abuse merit particularized application of executive function research, I turn to a 2009 study in the international journal Child Abuse and

Neglect which specifically “[e]xamined EFs [executive functions] among children exposed to familial trauma (e.g. sexual abuse, physical abuse, witnessing domestic violence)” (DePrince et al 354). Testing 110 “maltreated” children averaging age eleven on their executive function in developing brain areas, scientists found that “[c]hronic stress in the violent family environment has an impact on brain regions responsible for EFs [executive functions], such as the medial prefrontal cortex, thus affecting EF [executive function] performance” (354). Reporting executive dysfunction in specific behavioral categories, this study classifies that “Familial

Trauma (relative to non-familial and no trauma exposure) was associated with poorer performance on an EF composite (composed of working memory, inhibition, auditory attention, and processing speed tasks)” (353). The scientists note intensified impairment in adolescents’ fundamental executive functioning, concluding, “Strikingly, the current study demonstrates [a] relationship between familial-trauma exposure and basic executive functioning” ([itals in orig.]

359).

Scenes of Celie’s familial trauma correspond to executive dysfunctions found in this youth trauma study. Contributing author Anne DePrince summarizes that children and teens learn to “decrease attention” and “engage in distraction” from threat cues in hostile situations over which they have no power to stop, thus causing a “negative impact” on executive function development. She summarizes,

[V]arious cognitive strategies to avoid threat-related cues may contribute to global

changes in information processing, including EF performance. Because children

exposed to familial traumas are generally powerless to control the violence or 154 leave the relationship . . . the ability to decrease attention to threat cues may help

children navigate environments characterized by inescapable harm. For example,

children engage in distraction to avoid threat cues that may have a negative

impact on the development of EFs more generally. (354)

In the scene where Celie is sold for marriage, rather than focusing on Albert’s presence as her prospective “buyer,” Celie processes an array of environmental stimuli as distractions.

Conditioned to experience trauma from male figures, Celie does not concentrate on the image of

Albert raised high on his horse in a position of power and threat. Instead, Celie “navigates environments characterized by inescapable harm” by distracting herself from the primary “threat cue” to repeatedly notice her father’s rattling newspaper, her brother’s questions, the natural environment, and Albert’s horse. Walker writes,

I go stand in the door. The sun shine in my eyes. He’s still up on his horse.

He look me up and down.

Pa rattle his newspaper. Move up, he won’t bite, he say.

I go closer to the steps, but not too close cause I’m afraid of his horse.

Turn round, Pa say.

I turn round. One of my little brothers come up. I think it was Lucious. He

fat and playful, all the time munching on something.

He say, What you doing that for?

Pa say, Your sister thinking about marriage

Didn’t mean nothing to him. He pull my dresstail and ast can he have

some blackberry jam out the safe.

I say, Yeah. 155 She good with children, Pa say. Rattling his newspaper open more. (11)

Celie redirects the “threat cue” of Albert, and his marital purchase, instead onto the horse noting that she feels “afraid of his horse.” Celie’s state is hyper-sensory as she is distracted by the

“rattle” and again “[r]attling” of her stepfather’s newspaper, the “sun shine in [her] eyes,” the questions, dress “pull,” and “munching” by her younger brother, and the commands to “stand,” move “closer,” and “turn round” by her stepfather. Most of these arbitrary, equalized distractions are auditory, corresponding to the trauma study’s specification of the subjects’ “poorer . . . auditory attention” and focus. Even if Celie is not purposefully redirecting her attention away from the primary threat cue of Albert, she nonetheless seems to randomly notice a variety of stimuli, thus exhibiting problems with executive functions in the youth trauma study that include

“directing attention (including shifting, inhibiting, and focusing attention)” (DePrince et al 353).

A minor episodic description of the strife of Celie’s daily life has implications for executive dysfunction related to injury in this study. On Celie’s wedding day she endures a major head injury to the front of her skull. Celie recalls, “I spend my wedding day running from the oldest boy. He twelve. His mama died in his arms and he don’t want to hear nothing about no new one. He pick up a rock and laid my head open. The blood run all down tween my breasts.

His daddy say Don’t do that! . . . So after I bandage my head best I can and cook dinner” (12).

Mildly traumatic brain injuries are very common for adults in environments similar to the test sample of children, and correlate to deficits in executive functioning. DePrince summarizes that

“Insults to brain regions involved in EF [executive function] caused by mildly traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) could also impact EF [executive function] performance” (354). DePrince notes in a separate, parallel study on adults that “92% of women in domestic violence shelters report being struck in the head; the majority complained of EF [executive function] problems, including 156 distractibility, difficulty dividing attention, difficulty concentrating, and confusion” (354).

Celie’s head injury is severe enough that it “laid [her] head open”; impacted the front of her skull such that “blood run down tween [her] breasts”; and could only be partially bandaged and mended “best [she] can.” This seemingly random scene reads both symbolically as a bloody indoctrination into her new family, and practically as an injurious impact to Celie’s cognition.

DePrince suggests that further neuroscientific research is needed to unite the samples of abused children with the mild traumatic brain injuries they see so commonly in women: “Given that work with women exposed to domestic violence has demonstrated relationships between mild

TBIs and self-reported attention problems, future research with children should include more thorough screening of TBI history” (359). This familial trauma study exposes increased impairment in youth’s executive functions, including “working memory” and “auditory attention,” and considers circumstantial injury to the brain, offering a profile of dysfunctional teen cognition that Celie fits.

Remarkably, a key scene in Celie’s girlhood mirrors not only findings in neuroscience on

“normal” teen cognition, but emulates the very testing method used in these studies. With an entire letter given to the scene where Celie sees her first photograph as a teen girl, Celie analyzes the image of Shug Avery’s facial expression. Celie observes Shug’s “face,” “grin,” and “eyes,” giving emotive, contradictory, and multiple assessments of this one picture. Across several studies, neuroscientists used pictures of individuals making varying facial expressions to test if teens process emotions differently than adults. Results consistently show that teens misinterpret facial expressions, and attribute multiple incorrect affects to a single image, revealing through neuroimaging that “[t]he teen brain misreads facial expressions about 50% of the time because their brains haven’t fully matured” (Thomas 548). Teens’ brains draw responses from the limbic 157 region due to not having fully developed prefrontal cortexes. Because they’re drawing from the limbic region, the fight or flight area responsible for survival, teens’ responses fall on the extreme ends of the emotional spectrum of anger, fear, happiness, or sadness, whereas “adults use two different parts of the brain to make sophisticated judgments” and ‘offer more reasoned responses” (Bradley 7). An initial study in Journal of the American Academy of Child and

Adolescent Psychiatry found that different brain areas are stimulated during facial recognition as one ages:

Using functional MRI (fMRI), a team led by Dr. Deborah Yurgelun-Todd at

Harvard’s McLean Hospital scanned subjects’ brain activity while they identified

emotions on pictures of faces displayed on a computer screen. Young teens, who

characteristically perform poorly on the task, activated the amygdala, a brain

center that mediates fear and other “gut” reactions, more than the frontal lobe. As

they grow older, their brain activity during this task tends to shift to the frontal

lobe, leading to more reasoned perceptions and improved performance. (Baird et

al qtd in NIMH)

Later studies show that adolescents not only misevaluate faces through “gut reactions,” but also attribute multiple incorrect emotions to one image: “[s]ome subjects correctly categorized the faces as being fearful, while other faces were incorrectly categorized as angry, confused, surprised, or even happy. In short, although only one type of facial expression was presented, the adolescents frequently interpreted the faces as displaying more than one category of affect”

(Wong et al 2). Correspondingly, when Celie looks at a “picture” of Shug Avery, she interprets

Shug’s face as “displaying more than one category of affect” and classifies these affects along

the emotive spectrum of happy (“grinning”) to sadness (“Sad”). Celie responds to a picture of 158 Shug Avery which Nettie finds hidden by Albert:

She git a picture. The first one of a real person I ever seen. . . . Shug Avery was a

woman. The most beautiful woman I ever saw. She more pretty then my mama.

She bout ten thousand times more prettier then me. I see her there in furs. Her

face rouge. Her hair like somethin tail. She grinning with her foot up on

somebody motocar. Her eyes serious though. Sad some.

I ast her to give me the picture. An all night long I stare at it. An now

when I dream, I dream of Shug Avery.

While emotionally aroused by Shug’s beauty, Celie cannot distinguish Shug’s exact facial expression, classifying Shug as contrastingly “grinning,” “serious,” and “[s]ad.” Her emotional response, rather than her accurate analysis, parallels neuroscientific findings that “teens were moved by the pictures but were unable to figure out what they meant” (Bradley 7).

Although Celie’s seemingly impaired ability to read facial expressions parallels neuroscientific findings, one must consider this scene through a narrative lens as well as a scientific lens for its multiple implications. My informative parallels between neuroscience and literary representation are nonetheless imprecise and biologist, showing that Celie’s teen psyche moves in and out of scientific, ideological, and aesthetic registers. My chapter is concerned moreso with the intersection of these registers as a profile for the artist than for a singular neurological representation. For example, Celie’s classification of Shug as being “[s]ad some” in the photograph could be a projection of her own unhappiness which nuances Celie’s characterization rather than limits it. If Shug actually is sad in the picture, Celie may be showing an empathetic evaluation more sophisticated in its identification with the subject than simply its identification of the subject. Or Celie may be giving an accurate reading of apparent contrariness 159 in the image (we do not see the picture, of course). Ironically, this latter interpretation may be folded back into further neuroscientific findings that gender teens’ facial recognition patterns to show that girls are more accurate than boys in their determinations. Thomas summarizes gender disparities across these new neuroscientific studies including facial recognition tests:

It has been suggested that females are better at identifying emotional facial

expressions as well as having different patterns of amygdala and prefrontal

activation than males. There is also evidence suggesting differing patterns of

development of these brain regions in males and females. These studies suggest

that gender is an important issue to consider when measuring emotion recognition

abilities. (553)

Not a foregrounded variable in the new science of the teen brain, gender is nonetheless arising as an “important issue” in preliminary studies. However, Walker foregrounds gender throughout

Celie’s narrative. We know that Celie realizes her homosexuality later as an adult, which can reflexively frame this scene as an early rendering of Celie’s girlhood sexual desire. Celie’s sexual desire is shown in her emphasis on Shug’s “beauty” and in her taking the picture to bed with her to “dream.” Finally, Celie adopts this image of Shug Avery as a learned representation of ideologies of feminine desirability and womanliness when she dresses like Shug to deflect the stepfather from raping Nettie. Such narrative nuancing does not undercut Walker’s representation of Celie and Nettie in the neurological modes of traumatized “girl” and advanced

“woman” which I’ve described, but suggests that narrative form and style, as in a

“psychodrama,” may reflexively nuance scientific readings of subjectivity. Therefore, my next section considers the aged profiles of the teen “girl” and adult “woman” as social constructs.

160 Ideological Reading of Girlhood: Age, the Madonna/Whore Complex, and Girls’ Studies

Celie and Nettie negotiate the social signifiers “girl” and “woman” as an ideological binary that is recapitulated through their letters. Age is central to the sisters’ experience of their gender because the context repeatedly shapes the stepfather’s and Albert’s treatment of the teens and the teens’ perception of themselves. First, I argue that the stepfather abuses and separates the sisters based on his perception of Celie destabilizing girlhood gender norms and of Nettie reinforcing them. He perceives Celie as the hypersexual “woman” who is “too old” for familial protection when she fails to reinforce girlhood gender norms after his abuse (8). Conversely,

Nettie is the virginal “girl” who is “too young” for marital sale because she has “no experience” after eliding the stepfather’s advances, making her a figure who reinforces idealized girlhood constructs (7). The sisters operate within a Madonna/whore complex that cannot account for teens’ liminal, maturational body and developing sexuality. While this sexual binary has received much critique from feminist theorists for deifying, infantilizing, and demonizing women, its projection onto girls provokes new interpretations because girlhood sexuality is in the process of development, as well as situated at the intersection of childhood ideologies and feminine ideologies.

With hyper-sexualized “womanhood” projected onto her through abuse, pregnancy, and maternity at “fourteen years old,” Celie questions whether she fits the gender construct of a

“good girl” in the novel’s opening. Therefore, I secondly argue that Celie’s crisis of subjectivity is overdetermined as a crisis of age and girlhood. The novel introduces Celie considering these categories as she writes, “I am fourteen years old. -I am- I have always been a good girl” (1).

Celie problematizes each category by striking out the present-tense declaration “I am” for the past/present tense “I have always been.” She establishes her authorial validity by situating her 161 “girl” identity within social ideology of girls’ “good[ness]” which signifies sexual innocence and behavioral obedience, therefore engaging in discourses of femininity by writing the social paradigm of the “good girl.” Yet Celie subverts this status by graphically describing her rape a few sentences later. Walker’s beginning overdetermines questions of teenage girlhood in Celie’s attempts to navigate social ideology of girls in a body physically inscribed as adult. I claim that

Walker counters the projection of “womanhood” onto Celie by emphasizing Celie’s “innocence” in which she lacks knowledge about her social and physical condition and ceases menstruating.

Celie’s “innocence” informs her aesthetic modes and rewrites traditional forms of the

Bildungsroman and Kunstlerroman. Celie’s analysis of her social position as a “good girl” versus an “evil” girl is reiterated in her letters through a psychic split into ideological, as well as neurological, profiles of aged femininity (1).

The stepfather believes Celie transgresses girlhood bodily norms through her multiple births. Only two pages after Celie declares that she is “fourteen years old,” she writes in her third letter that her stepfather demonizes her reproductive body:

Dear God, he act like he can’t stand me no more. Say I’m evil an always up to no

good. He took my other little baby, a boy this time. But I don’t think he killed it. I

think he sold it to a man an his wife over Monticello. I got breasts full of milk

running down myself. He say Why don’t you look decent? Put on something. But

what am I supposed to put on? (3)

Celie frames the extreme act of her baby’s sale within her stepfather’s critiques of her bodily function and appearance. I am suggesting that the stepfather would not find Celie’s births as angering if they came from an adult woman, a figure that signifies fertility. Rather, he “can’t stand” Celie who he deems is “evil and always up to no good,” “[in]decent,” and “a bad 162 influence on my other girls” because she destabilizes his notions of girlhood innocence (8).

Echoing Celie’s preceding question of whether she is a “good girl,” the stepfather declares Celie is “no good.” Celie’s lactating breasts also garner a heated response. Barrie Thorne highlights the ways in which girls’ pubertal bodies destabilize notions of childhood innocence: “In our culture we draw sharp distinction between ‘child’ and ‘adult’, defining child as relatively asexual . . . and the adult as sexual . . . [C]harged with bodily meaning, fully developed breasts seem uncomfortably out of place on the bodies of individuals we define as children. A sense of pollution derives . . . from the violation of the basic lines of social structure.” By lactating, Celie exaggerates an already unsettled image of the child in the teen girl. Rather, Celie’s pubertal body is already hypersexualized as the first letter outlines how “he grab hold of my titties. Then push his thing inside my pussy. When that hurt, I cry” (1).

The stepfather sells Celie and retains Nettie based on Celie’s perceived behavioral transgressions of desexualized girlhood. He demonizes Celie as “evil” because she elicits his desire, is perceived as flirtatious, and mimics adult femininity to protect Nettie. Celie is

“beat[en]” after her stepfather thinks she “winked at a boy in church” and therefore violated social ideology of girls’ chasteness (5). Yet Celie innocently responds “I may have got something in my eye but I didn’t wink. I don’t even look at mens. That’s the truth” (5). While insisting on Celie’s sexual availability to him, the stepfather paradoxically reprimands her at the suggestion of her flirting, or being sexually forward. Through this abuse, Celie becomes conscious of desired images of femininity. Celie mimics adult femininity, which she sees in a picture of Shug Avery, in order to deflect the rape of Nettie: “Dear God, I ast him to take me instead of Nettie . . . I duck into my room and come out wearing horsehair, feathers, and a pair of our new mammy high heel shoes. He beat me for dressing trampy but he do it to me anyway” 163 (7). The father punishes Celie for her erotic display yet he is simultaneously titillated and rapes her. Eddy highlights this scene’s racial articulations, arguing that the extravagant, ridiculous fashion Celie wears signifies black aesthetics reproducing a parody of African American culture.

She writes, “[Celie’s] actions become understood as a repetitive parody of the mastery, domination, and ownership of blacks during slavery. . . . One can interpret this scene as the gendered construction of the female as object for display for the male gaze” (49). Yet Celie is not simply enacting a racial objectification, but an adult one, too. She assumes her gender performance of adult femininity signifies sexuality. Berlant suggests, though does not analyze, the identity category of age for this scene: “Celie’s youthful masquerade as Shug in order to deflect her father’s sexual greed can also be read as a complex and contradictory message growing out of this kind of racist context. . . . In order to protect Nettie, Celie dresses up as a heterosexual, sexually available woman, an imitation of the promotional picture of Shug Avery”

(54-5 [my emphasis]). A second “complex and contradictory message” of this scene is how Celie adopts a fashioned appearance of sexuality, for which she is punished as being incongruous with girlhood, yet occupies a girl’s body that is seemingly sexual a priori. Despite assimilating to adult femininity, Celie next lies “in the bed crying” like a child which underscores her adolescent trauma (7).

Celie is punished for crossing the categorical distinctions between asexual child and sexual adult, despite this crossing being forced upon her. Jenny Kintzinger notes how romanticized notions of the sexually innocent child stigmatize and exclude those who do not conform to this ideal. She writes that any child who sexually responds, is sexually knowledgeable, or is sexually experienced willingly or not is “stained as damaged goods and no longer justifies or warrants our protection.” Thus, Celie’s stepfather next declares he “got to 164 git rid of” her because she is “spoiled. Twice.” Conversely, the stepfather characterizes Nettie as having “no experience,” containing her within a definition of sexual virtue, one he nonetheless finds titillating through “[t]he eroticization of (feminised) innocence.” Valerie Walkerdine notes the reciprocity in this binarism: “It is the girl as erotic object that threatens the innocence of the rational child” (18). The stepfather hypersexualizes Celie in multiple physical and imagined ways, showing that “[t]he very existence of the nymphet requires a second child, socially constructed as innocent, to conceal the source of the desires projected onto her” (Karlyn 69).

Because the girl is always already heterosexualized, yet simultaneously desexualized, as part of a

“normal” girlhood femininity, “a female adolescent [is] a curious figure that takes up a central position within the two most pervasive powerful ‘dreams’ underlying patriarchal culture: phallocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality” (Hoogland 90). As a teen girl, Celie is positioned at the intersection of childhood and womanhood ideologies, occupying an eroticized space of girls’ and women’s perceived deficiencies. Ilana Nash summarizes this position of double “lack”: “Combining the categories of children and women, teen girls are celebrated for their double emptiness the child’s lack of experience, and the woman’s lack of agency or rationality . . . which facilitates their portrayals as diminished, fetishized, and frequently sexualized.” Using social constructs of girls’ simultaneous sexual innocence and availability in their exploitation, the stepfather sells Celie and retains Nettie.

The stepfather rejects Albert’s request for Nettie based on her emphasized youth, which he equates with inexperience and ignorance. Walker writes, “Mr. ___ finally come right out and ask for Nettie hand in marriage. But He won’t let her go. He say she too young, no experience. . .

. He say, real slow, I can’t let you have Nettie. She too young. Don’t know nothing but what you tell her” (6, 7). Under the pretense of protecting an impressionable girl, the stepfather keeps 165 Nettie from marriage while he also pursues raping her. Incorrectly characterized as “know[ing] nothing but what you tell her,” Nettie thoroughly educates herself and is actively resistant to physical abuse, eventually fleeing home for protection. Although also a teen girl, Celie is comparatively determined marriageable because she is the “older” sister and is sexually knowledgeable after abuse. The stepfather continues, “But I can let you have Celie. She the oldest anyway . . . Fact is, he say, She too old to be living here at home. And she a bad influence on my other girls” (7, 8). Instead of being “too young,” Celie is “too old.” Nettie must be protected from Celie’s sexualizing influence because she is a “bad influence” among the “other girls.” Tucker argues that the stepfather’s censure here and elsewhere, such as in the scene of

Celie’s mistaken “wink,” demonstrates the pervasiveness of the Madonna/whore syndrome for females: “Another ‘story’ of the father is that Celie is loose, ‘evil’ certainly a projection of the old patriarchal text whereby all women are either virgins or whores” (85). Nash likewise notes that “[d]iscussions of female teens [are] overlaid with older expressions of misogyny, which often situated women within a binary that many have called the ‘Madonna/whore’ dichotomy”

(3). Walker reverses this sexualization by concluding the scene with Celie’s “innocence” as she immediately “stop[s] crying” because she is “so surprise[d]” at being offered for marriage (8).

Despite having seen numerous girl brides previously, including her own “mammy,” Celie cannot predict her inevitable future as she lacks the ability to project causal relationships. Celie’s

“mammy” in particular has only been described in youthful terms, as when Celie remarks of her stepfather marrying a young girl three letters earlier: “Dear God, He come home with a girl from round Gray. She be my age but they be married. He be on her all the time. She walk round like she don’t know what hit her” (4). Celie notes the disjunction between the girl’s “age but” her status as wife, foreshadowing Celie’s imminent matrimony. 166 Aware of the social value of virginity in girl brides, the stepfather addresses how Celie

“ain’t fresh” after two births by reframing her resulting infertility as a type of sexual benefit. He states, “She ain’t fresh, tho, but I spect you know that. She spoiled. Twice. But you don’t need a fresh woman no how. . . . And God done fixed her. You can do everything just like you want to and she ain’t gonna make you feed it or clothe it” (7-8). His emphasis on Celie’s lacking fertility undermines her portrayal as a complete woman. Ross argues that “Celie’s fragmentation is most strongly reinforced by the way her stepfather presents her as less than a whole woman to her future husband, convincing him to marry her because ‘God done fixed her’” (75). As “less than a whole woman,” Celie is, in fact, a girl. In this moment of her “surprise” substitution for Nettie and her sale as both hypersexual for “everything” and less-than-woman, Celie enacts one of her first explicit imaginative projections as an expression of her artistry. During Albert’s silence,

Celie projects her voice onto an image of Shug Avery in response to the illogic of the situation:

“Mr. ___ still don’t say nothing. I take out the picture of Shug Avery. I look into her eyes. Her eyes say Yeah, it bees that way sometime” (8). Celie imagines another figure confirming her emotions. This moment encapsulates Celie’s psychic fragmentation and sensory/lyric epistolary mode. Immediately following this imagining, the stepfather insists he must be “rid of” Celie while retaining Nettie who will “Not now. Not never” be available. The context of age concludes the sales discussion: “Mr. ___ say How old she is? He say, she near twenty” (8). Ideologies of age frame all evaluations of the girls’ “too old” and “too young” identities. While Celie is reinforced as the older sister, my argument posits that she is figuratively the younger identity.

This reading is supported by the stepfather’s declaration that Celie “tells lies” which is juxtaposed with his vague classification of her age. “Mr. ___ say How old she is? He say, She near twenty. And another thing She tell lies” (8). Aimed at protecting himself from Celie 167 exposing the truth of incest, the stepfather’s interjection that Celie is a liar “seems a strange accusation to make of a helpless girl; what it really does is attempt to offset Celie’s own story that of rape” (Tucker 85). Celie will tell her story of rape as one inextricably tied to age. The stepfather’s preemptive censure of Celie’s future voice, coupled with his unclear determination of her “near” age, only temporarily silences these contexts.

To counter the stepfather’s hypersexualizing Celie as “too old,” Walker literalizes Celie’s

“innocence” through impaired menstruation and cognition. Celie’s trauma, and the novel, open with an imposed “womanhood” of rape, childbirth, and maternity from which Celie moves into a form of “innocent” girlhood where she no longer menstruates. This is a reverse movement from a

“normal” developmental trajectory that Nettie follows of an “innocent” girlhood with a pubescent body transitioning into sexually procreative “womanhood.” Central to my argument that Celie figures “girlhood” is how Celie stops menstruating as a teen, portrays teenage cognition, redefines herself as a “virgin” in adulthood, declares she’s “the youngest I ever felt” at the close of the novel, and embodies innocence. Molly Hite characterizes The Color Purple through Celie’s “innocence”: “Celie’s defining quality, and thus the defining quality of the narrative, is innocence. If this innocence subjects her to violation at the onset of the story, it also figures as the capacity for wonder and thus for experience” (436). Celie’s intellectual

“innocence,” or inability to comprehend her rape and impregnation, suggests a parallel

“innocent” sexuality that her abuse contradicts. This discrepancy creates an experiential and ideological conflict for the molested girl, a conflict which opens the novel in her reflexive rewriting of her status as “girl.” bell hooks suggests that Celie maintains the status of an

“innocent” throughout, stating, “Celie’s voice remains that of appropriated other interpreted translated represented as authentic unspoiled innocent” (466). Celie’s teenage years and early 168 twenties demonstrate a type of delayed maturation making “[t]he early portions of the novel illustrate Celie’s arrested development” (Ross 75). This reverse trajectory lays the groundwork for the latter portions of the novel, including Celie’s relationship with Shug and commercial independence, which ultimately demonstrate a successful maturation.

After two births, Celie’s lack of menstruation notably not just infertility− emphasizes an imaginatively innocent girl’s body. Although Celie’s body is a distinctly girl body, critics totalize it to represent the corporeal feminine as “the female body within the text’” (Wall qtd in

Eddy 41). Yet Celie’s body moves from fertility to infertility, a pubertal reversal that problematizes her classification as a generalizable “corporeal feminine.” Celie parallels the end of her menstrual period to the halting of time and potentiality: “I say Marry him, Nettie, an try to have one good year out of your life. After that, I know she be big. But me, never again. A girl at church say you get big if you bleed every month. I don’t bleed no more” (5). Celie emphasizes that she will “no more,” “never again” become pregnant (“big”) or have “one good year,” as the erasure of her menstrual period signifies a stasis in physicality, time, and happiness. Her body reads as a perpetual girl body, one that cannot “get big,” rhetoric of maturational growth. Celie is equally “innocent,” or unaware, of her basic physiology such that “She describes her own reproduction in the words of a child” (71). Biological information must come from “a girl at church.” Conversely, Nettie will use her own menstruation to reflect on her resilience in the

African climate, on Celie’s daughter’s embodiment, and on the social treatment of girls in Africa

(188). Eddy recognizes discursive contradictions and slippages in the treatment of Celie’s corporeality in the novel, though she does not look at girlhood. She writes that the epistolary form as bodily figuration demonstrates that the body itself is “ungrounded,” making “Celie’s unsigned, misaddressed, and presumably not sent [letters], and Nettie’s intercepted [letters] so 169 that their reception is deferred and delayed emphasiz[e] that the corporeal body is itself insubstantial and ungrounded” (40).

Celie’s “innocent” girlhood body and mind destabilize phallocentric paradigms because her “persistent incomprehension of the effects of her rapes helps to dislocate from her body the cultural narratives most often associated with the feminine [hetero]sexuality and maternity.

Celie’s discourse indicates that the body-as-text mis-speaks these narratives of maternal subjectivity and sexual desire” (Eddy 42). If “Celie’s sense of the body’s articulation of maternity is mysterious and surreal,” Celie’s girlhood body is a site of meaning that signifies enigmatically according to what is imprinted on it by others about adult femininity (Eddy 43).

Celie’s opening confusion about “what is happening to [her]” reads as confusion about life linearity within gender scripts of girls’ sexuality, revealing how “cultural texts of female adolescence critically expose the conflicts and contradictions inherent in the self evident ‘truth’ of femininity” (Nash 4). Celie’s initial subordinate gender position as a girl results from a violent masculine and heterosexual inscription of her body through physical and sexual abuse. Yet her following “innocent,” non-menstruating body makes reinscription of her subjectivity possible through a reclaimed girlhood.

Celie physical reversal disturbs the notion that “the girl” is only the “process of becoming

Woman.” Her abnormal physical and cognitive development rewrites traditional forms of the

Bildungsroman and Kunstlerroman. As a Kunstlerroman, the psychodramatic novel “examine[s] pathways for creativity through metonymic oppositions rather than narrating the developmental unfolding of a single protagonist” (Friedman 145). The nonlinear, spatial characteristic of The

Color Purple’s letters does not convey a “developmental unfolding of a single protagonist.”

Instead, sexual trauma disrupts Celie’s girlhood mental and physical development by terminating 170 her menstruation and impairing her cognition, which Walker represents through a fragmented, nonlinear epistolary form. The Color Purple resists the traditional notion of female adolescence as the experience of “becoming woman.” Feminist literary scholarship largely views the girl as indistinguishable from Woman by treating girlhood as an initiation period into womanhood or by analyzing girls reflexively through the adult characters they become. Likewise, studies of the

Bildungsroman and Kunstlerroman prioritize the trajectory toward womanhood by treating girlhood as a transitional phase that’s often foreclosed in favor of adulthood, where one achieves subjectivity and artistry. The linear unfolding of time and movement through initiation rites emphasizes girlhood as a perpetually transitory state of time rather than established duration of one form of subject. But Girls’ Studies gives girlhood its own identity category as a separate stage in the human life cycle predicated on the adolescent girl’s different body, brain, and culture. In “The Scholar Recalls the Child: The Difference Girlhood Studies Makes,” Megan

Sullivan argues that her initial literary critical readings were future-directed toward the adult woman and “neglected another avenue of study: the girl in the story” because she “understood the female child in [the novel] primarily as a narrative tool, or as a fictional device to get to the real point: the woman” (95, 98 [emphasis in orig.]). Sullivan argues that it was a mistake to

“‘skip over’ the girl in order to get to the woman in the story” because this critical method resulted in one-sided readings where “the childhood scenes did not illuminate the life of the young female; [instead] they only underscored the ideological distance the adult traveled” (97-

98). Concluding that the girl’s “story is as important as is the narrative of the adult woman she will become,” Sullivan notes that previously she “lacked the critical apparatus” to illuminate this subject position (96, 98). Through Girls’ Studies, Sullivan sees new potential literary critical readings, suggesting how, “In a different reading that is, in a reading informed by Girlhood 171 Studies [she] might have examined . . . the life expectancy for girls . . . educational opportunities for female adolescents . . . and girls’ interpola[tion] into a class conscious society”

(97). The Color Purple rejects the history of defining girls only through a maturational trajectory that turns them into mediums of social continuity. While Nettie follows this heteronormative linearity by moving into a socially sanctioned sexuality and marriage, Celie portrays her opposite as one part of a composite psyche that negotiates a social path to adulthood through reclamation of girlhood. Because Celie’s girlhood does not fit conventional expectation, she is forced to foreground a girl identity as a site for understanding, and recuperating, the self. This novel, therefore, delineates the teen years as a new, experimental site of identity.

Conclusion

Although Walker defines black feminist “womanism” as “Opp. of ‘girlish,’ i.e., frivolous, irresponsible, not serious,” her novel enacts a narrative psychodrama of a single artistic psyche split by sexual trauma into different aspects of developmental girlhood (Gardens Preface). Celie and Nettie’s mental, emotional, and aesthetic divergences represent differing psychological sides to girlhood sexual trauma and girlhood social constructs. One self figures a subjective state of stasis, passivity, sensation, and emotionality as one existing in a perpetual present of girlhood victimization; the other self figures an objective state of activity, defiance, analysis, and future- directedness as one who will scrutinize girls’ sexual trauma on national and historical levels.

These mental/emotional profiles correspond to aged cognitive modes in neuroscience, including specialized neuroscientific research on teens’ cognitive impairment from physical and sexual abuse in the family. While this neuroscience frames the sisters as psychological figurations of

“the girl” and “the woman,” psychodramatic narrative form lends aesthetic and ideological support to these figurations. Celie and Nettie negotiate the social signifiers “girl” and “woman” 172 as an ideological binary that shapes their abuses or freedoms. To counter the stepfather’s classification of Nettie as “too young” and Celie as “too old,” Walker emphasizes Celie’s

“innocence” by disrupting Celie’s girlhood mental and physical development while emphasizing

Nettie’s learnedness by facilitating her guaranteed developmental future. These static and dynamic states shape the sisters’ epistolary aesthetics into body and mind; abject and subject; presence and absence; sensory and abstraction; language and theory; lyric-poetic and prose; present and future; and girl and adult. On the level of storyline, Celie and Nettie’s physical separation and epistolary reunion correspond to Celie losing then reclaiming her agency, which I argue is figured by Nettie. Overall, neurological and ideological readings of girlhood in The

Color Purple reveal that age is an intersectional axis of identity and that “the girl” is a central trope for representing the artistic imagination.

173 Chapter Four: Girlhood Biopolitics in Sapphire’s Push: Obesity, Sexual Arousal, and HIV Infection

To talk I have to tell how I feel in my body. The war. My body my head I can’t say it right. How cum I’m so young and feel so old? So young like I don’t know nuffin’, so old like I know everything. A girl have her father’s dick in her mouth know things the other girls don’t know but it’s not what you want to know. Sapphire, Push (129)

My final chapter shows that feminist authors’ representation of girlhood subjectivity and sexuality becomes more developed, transparent, and politically explicit from early to late twentieth-century. My authors portray a spectrum of girlhood sexuality from enforced innocence and silenced psychosexuality (Woolf), to sexual recognition yet depoliticized self-expression

(Beauvoir), to imposed sexualization and internal self-exploration (Walker), to hypersexualization and open expression of biological disease, premature maturation, and sexual sensation. Sapphire’s Push offers a confident character voice that interrogates social injustices through, I argue, written assertions of girl subjectivity, age, and sexual embodiment. Precious

Jones outwardly-directs critiques of her personal and systemic victimizations that manifest in her prematurely developed, HIV-positive, and traumatically aroused teen girl body. Precious is a poor, illiterate, overweight, HIV positive sixteen-year-old girl, student, and single-mother who is verbally, physically, and sexually abused by her mother and father and is failed by educational,

Welfare, and medical systems. Yet she is not silenced or submissive, as she opens the novel with declarations of identity within statements of familial sexual trauma, and declarations of age within her critiques of unfair school policy that delays pregnant students’ scholarship. Using

Girls’ Studies biological research on African American girls’ earlier menstruation, increasing

HIV infection, and arousal during sexual abuse, I argue that Precious’s complex biopolitical embodiment in Sapphire’s Push shifts feminist politics on the incest story to recognize girlhood 174 sexual embodiment, psychosexuality, micropolitics, and authorship. Precious’s candid, socially- critical written expressions of her sexual subjectivity destabilize the traditional feminist incest story that insists on the innocence and desexualization of the child to construct a family power imbalance of dominant men who unfairly place blame on the conceit of seductive girls.

Precious acquires knowledge of her HIV/AIDS with her ABC’s, making Precious’s trauma writing express new biopolitics in the teen girl body. Precious self-consciously reflects on the act of writing and on herself as a emergent writer/“poet,” showing her written material with its grammatical and syntactical errors lessening as she progresses. Therefore, Sapphire offers a more direct and developed representation of the girl writer than my prior dissertation texts. I argue that Push foregrounds girls as a new community of written voices because the novel uses

Precious’s first-person voice with her phonetic speech patterns, traces Precious’ path to literacy with her spelling and grammar errors, and honors her innate, outspoken social voice.

Furthermore, the novel collectivizes girls’ voices because it closes with a section of girls’ essays and is based on Sapphire’s creative-writing social work with inner-city teen girls. Katrine

Dalsgard notes a formal change from Alice Walker to Sapphire’s treatment of girlhood authorial voice, a difference that supports my dissertation’s argument on increasing feminist recognition of the girl writer. She states, “[W]hile Alice Walker dramatizes [the girl’s] progression towards selfhood through literacy, Sapphire has Precious describe her progress consciously and self- reflexively” while including her composition throughout, showing that “Precious is in fact a writer” (179, itals in orig.). Push does not reinscribe constructs of “the woman writer” but rather diversifies this category based on age.

In her writing and daily activities, Precious explicitly philosophizes micropolitical actions that include girlhood considerations. Precious speaks and negotiates incest in its day-to-day 175 abuses, thereby gesturing to modern systemic injustices that repeatedly disempower black teen girls. Her isolated, situational struggles written from her uncensored point-of-view portray the girl as political activist and social commentator. Precious is part of a new generation of black female protagonists that “already know who they are and what they need” (Reid 314). While

Precious deepens in racial self-acceptance as the novel progresses, she puts less emphasis on the personal angst of self-discovery than on the daily negotiation of intersectional contexts like family, school, and sex in which she struggles to survive, mature intellectually, and be recognized socially. Precious shares experiences of paternal rape, childbirth, and physical abuse with her intertexual doppelganger, Celie, of The Color Purple, but her outspokenness, sexual self-awareness, sexual explicitness, daily evaluations, and pursuit of life alternatives constitute a new kind of girl subjectivity that shifts earlier feminist literary themes. Precious’s life unfolds slowly among micropolitical choices and without reconciliation, constituting a “literary shift into exploring the daily rhythms of life without always testifying to the larger oppressions of race, gender, and class” (Reid 323). When reading The Color Purple, Precious contrasts her

“REALITY” to Celie’s utopic conclusions, suggesting that her experience also deviates from earlier black “recovery novels” to favor realism over escapism (83, caps in orig.). Precious’s intellectual evolution through literacy contrasts her physical devolution through HIV/AIDS.

Concluding with Precious in her late teens and the promise of a simultaneously opened and foreclosed future, Push demonstrates how “this group of recent [African American women] writers offers few ideas about long-term solutions [such that] characters lives are rarely reborn into completely fresh starts” (Reid 324). Precious’s micropolitical considerations and her awareness of realism and irresolution in social politics and life offer new feminist expressions in the context of girlhood. 176 Precious’s physical states cause slippage in her social signification as a teen girl, suggesting a new kind of female embodiment that is culturally invisible, thereby highlighting age as intersecting racial invisibility. Precious’s embodiment is inseparable from the context of age, an axis of identity Sapphire foregrounds in the novel. Precious’s premature sexualization and her process of recovery through flashbacks create a formal nonlinearity. To narrate and order her life, Precious contextualizes scenes by repeatedly asserting her current age in her late teens, and her past ages during abuse, while also critiquing how her youth is incongruous with abusive treatment. Because she validates her personhood to others and her remembered experience to the reader by stating, even shouting, her ages, Precious shows age as both a stable and unstable identity marker in the text. Correspondingly, Precious’ obesity causes her to look physically older than her teen years, also making her declare her identity as a “chile” and “girl.” She labels herself a “girl” in both speech, “I is all girl,” and in writing, “I am girl / I am black,” because she does not signify as one (44 itals in orig., 76). Precious’s body secondly exceeds expectations of teen girlhood by becoming aroused during sexual abuse. In her mid-teens when she would naturally be developing sexual feelings and titillations, Precious grapples with contrary emotions of sexual arousal and disgust during her incestuous abuse. In perhaps the most controversial, contemporary representation of a black literary history thematizing incest and recovery, Sapphire portrays Precious as experiencing both pleasure and distress during rape, creating an embodied confusion for the teen girl. While teen girls are generally discouraged from acknowledging sexual feelings and desires, and sexual victimization is considered antithetical to pleasure,

Precious’ experience of victim orgasm is unintelligible within the context of abuse. Precious’s feeling, speaking, and writing girl body is integral to how these “new novels . . . embody a shift” to “the contemporary social and artistic challenges th[ier authors] and their characters face” 177 (314). Precious’s “feel[ing]” sexual identity, causing her confusion yet self-awareness, spurs self-examination and supports her fight for a perceived social identity (31, 64 itals in orig.). Her sexual embodiment offers a new literary model where “[t]he power of this vision resides in the conviction that raw experience can be represented” (Doane 124). Finally, as a young African

American female, Precious does not fit social stereotypes of HIV/AIDS victims. In “The

(Missing) Faces of African American Girls with AIDS,” Nels Highberg argues that master narratives which polarize the disease to homosexual men and Africans outside the U.S. erase how “African American girls with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) make up a significant portion of those now affected by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), yet their stories rarely appear in mainstream media” (1). Precious’s HIV infection is a surprise to her and to the reader with its disclosure toward the end of the novel, showing that the disease is not yet culturally intelligible in girls. Continuing the African American literary trope of black invisibility, Precious senses that she is socially unrecognized, yet her obesity, sexual arousal, and

HIV complicate prior notions of social erasure to show that gender and age shape racial in/visibility.

Recent Girls’ Studies biological and sociological findings suggest new biopolitics in the girl body. I will apply Girls’ Studies research on African American girls’ growing HIV infection, teen sexual abuse victims’ conflict with arousal, and links between inner-city minority girls’ nutrition and earlier physical maturation to representations of Precious’s bodily experiences. I situate Precious’s HIV diagnosis within new data that shows 39 percent of new HIV infections in

African American females are among ages 13-19. Furthermore, recent data also reveals that

AIDS is the primary cause of death among black women ages 25-34. Because we know the onset of infection often occurs years before long-term, physical symptoms appear, the young adult 178 mortality rate suggests that many of these women became infected with HIV as teenagers or children (CDC 2008). I compare scenes of Precious’s orgasms, and resulting confusion, during rape to psychological studies on adolescents’ conflicts with sexual arousal during ongoing sex abuse. Finally, I parallel scenes where Precious is violently force-fed by her mother, steals fast food, and examines her prematurely developed and obese body to Girls’ Studies biological research on dietary connections to African American girls’ earlier physical maturation and menstruation. When comparing fictional characterization with scientific research, I do not wish to imply that Precious has a biological existence, or that her characterization merely parallels the generalized data on teen girls. I am supporting the newness of Precious’s representational body and, by extension, feminist authors’ recognition of girlhood subjectivity and sexuality, with data showing the contemporariness of these girlhood physical states. I am also showing that Push adds to our scientific knowledge. Push suggests that the growing, though still scant, research on adolescent arousal during sex abuse lacks a sustained portrait of how repeat abuse and arousal interacts with language. Push also suggests that premature physical development from poor diet and unhealthy food is escalated in instances where food is used as a tool of abuse, and shares thematic parallels to adolescent sexual abuse resulting in pregnancy. Finally, Push frames the absence of social awareness of HIV in black teen girls as a social “narrative” absence, filling this erasure with Precious’s as well as many other girls’ writings.

Given these new, disturbing, and unintelligible physical states, Precious’s fight for social recognition in her teen girl body represents a new biopolitics that transforms representations of girlhood subjectivity and sexuality shown by earlier feminist incest novelists. Precious writes, speaks, and feels her girlhood psychosexual subjectivity, thereby offering an outspoken, proactive, sexually-aware, socially-critical, and situationally analytical characterization that 179 represents new twentieth-century feminist politics. While signifying on an already established body of African American novels that deal with fundamental issues of invisibility, incest, and literacy, Sapphire establishes a bold new characterization in Precious, a character that Sapphire asserts, “[t]o me, she has not existed in literature before” (Keehnen).

Author and Novel Contextualization

Sapphire, born Romona Lofton in 1950, is a bisexual African American poet, novelist, and activist. Lofton took the name “Sapphire” because of its one-time cultural association with the image of an overbearing, belligerent black woman. Her political engagement includes being an active member of United Lesbians of Color for Change Inc., working as a parent-child mediator for the Children’s Aid Society and as a remedial reading teacher for low-income, high risk students in Harlem, and, finally, defending her work when one of her poems became a central exhibit in the conservative assault on the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1987,

Sapphire self-published her first book of poetry, Meditations on the Rainbow, which received little attention. But she was soon thrust into the limelight by a poem she published in a small,

NEA-funded LGBTQ journal in 1992 titled “Wild Thing,” which was inspired by the rape of a white female jogger in Central Park by a group of African-Americans and contains disturbing images and subject matter. Lines from her poem were taken out of context, distributed to members of Congress, and held up as an example of anti-Christian art funded by American taxpayers. Sapphire explains how the campaign “was a real disservice to me. My work was used against me and I was painted as a pervert playing into the sexual exploitation of women. I spent so many years of my life undoing the effects of my own sexual abuse as a child, trying to help my students with this, and be an advocate in my own community with stopping rape, denouncing incest, and exposing the sexual exploitation and victimization of women. Then to have someone 180 parade the material like that was very harmful” (Keenhen). In 1994, Sapphire published a collection of poetry and short prose pieces, American Dreams, which was very well received, winning her several awards, including the MacArthur Scholarship in Poetry and the Year of the

Poet Award. Recognized as a serious author, Sapphire received a half million dollar advance to finish her novel, Push, which was published in 1996.

Push is written in ungrammatical, phonetic prose as an internal monologue spoken by its half-literate protagonist, Claireece Precious Jones, an obese, HIV-positive Harlem teenager who is repeatedly raped by her father and who gives birth to a child with Down’s Syndrome when she was twelve. Her mother, who brutalizes Precious and steals the welfare checks that come in the mail for Precious and her daughter, kicks her out of her home at age sixteen when she again becomes pregnant by her father. Precious proactively seeks help from remedial reading programs and incest survivors’ groups for girls where, with the aid of a sympathetic teacher, she becomes literate, writes about her trauma, and discovers her own voice. The novel concludes with

Precious still in her teens as she parents her second child and ambivalently looks toward the future. Push’s experimental style includes Precious’s stream-of-consciousness expression in prose that defies the conventions of spelling and usage. As the book progresses and Precious learns to read and write there is a stark change in her voice, though the dialect remains the same.

In her literacy training, Precious writes poems, causing the text to move in and out of poetry and prose, with expression improving and deepening as time goes on. The novel concludes in a series of writings by other girls in Precious’s class, suggesting both a collective consciouness for

Precious and the ubiqiutous abuse of economically vulnerable minority teen girls. Sapphire states that the novel is drawn from real-life experience teaching and mentoring inner-city teen girls,

“This novel isn’t conjecture, or some studies I read. This is life as I observed it,” she told 181 Newsweek; and explained to Keehnen that Precious is “a composite of many young women I encountered when I worked as a literacy teacher in Harlem and the Bronx for 7 years. Over and over I met people with circumstances similar to hers, many with her amazing spirit.” Most reviewers hailed Push, and it garnered Sapphire the Black Caucus of the American Library

Association’s First Novelist Award. However, the novel has been criticized for its controversial language and for reinforcing stereotypes of African Americans. My chapter takes issue with the critique that Push’s explicit descriptions of Precious’s sexual abuse are “pornographic.” I argue this explicitness is essential to Sapphire’s biopolitical portrayal of a sexually-aware, culturally critical teen girl articulating a contemporary femininst consciousness that centralizes age.

Age, Agency, and Micropolitics

Precious states her girlhood ages to assert her identity, validate her lived experience, and order her story. Rather than add complete clarity and linearity to Precious’s story, however, her statements of age show the slippage of this identity constituent when paired with a history of premature sexualization. Precious’s struggle to prove her subjectivity to society, and the reader, ultimately reads as a declaration of her girlhood ages and, by extension, female adolescence.

Sapphire frames Precious’s introduction to the reader, and to the first several characters of the novel, within the context of age. Push opens with Precious asserting multiple ages and dates, creating a convoluted chronology within attempts to chart her autobiography:

I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my fahver. That was

1983. I was out of school for a year. This gonna be my second baby. My daughter

got Down Sinder. She’s retarded. I got left back in the second grade too, when I

was seven, ‘cause I couldn’t read. I should be in the eleventh grade, getting ready

to go into the twelf’ grade so I can gone ‘n graduate. But I’m not. I’m in the ninfe 182 grade. I got suspended from school ‘cause I’m pregnant which I don’t think is

fair. I ain’ did nothin’! My name is Claireece Precious Jones. (3)

A myriad of numbers confuse the present tense, conflating Precious’ ages, grades, and births.

Despite her destabilized identity, Precious repeatedly declares her subjecthood (“I”) and critiques educational policy. She then validates her spoken and written voice, stating, “I don’t know how far I’m gonna go with this story . . . you can do anything when you’re talking or writing. Some people tell a story ‘n it don’t make no sense or be true. But I’m gonna try to make sense and tell the truth, else what’s the fucking use? Ain’ enough lies and shit out there already?” (3-4).

Precious’s assuredness exemplifies how contemporary African American women writers “have felt less need to have their characters start over with fundamental questions of personal identity” but rather “the characters frequently enter the first chapter with confidence earlier characters struggled to reach in final pages” (Reid 315). The first chapter opens with Precious in school when a counselor confronts her about her pregnancy. Here and elsewhere, Precious’s naming is juxtaposed with slippage in her age. Asked her name, she replies,

“Claireece.”

Everybody call me Precious. I got three name – Claireece Precious Jones.

Only motherfuckers I hate call me Claireece.

“How old are you, Claireece?”

White cunt box got my file on hr desk. I see it. I ain’t that late to lunch. Bitch

know how old I am.

“Sixteen is ahh”— she clear her throat—“old to still be in junior high

school.” (6)

Precious is personally accused of being too “old” for her grade, yet she suffers because of the 183 failure of the educational system that wants to hold her back again for this second pregnancy.

Precious contests, “You can’t suspend me for being pregnant, I got rights!” (8). As this argument climaxes, the novel concurrently cuts to a third introduction of Precious, when she goes into labor with her first baby after a brutal physical beating from her mother. In this flashback,

Precious answers the ambulance driver’s questions about her identity that repeat the theme of age confusion. Barely conscious, Precious ponders,

My name? Precious Jones. Claireece Precious Jones to be exact. Birth date?

November 4, 1970. Where? “Here,” I say, “right chere in Harlem Hospital.”

“Nineteen seventy?” the nurse say confuse quiet. Then she say, “How old are

you?” I say, “Twelve.” I was heavy at twelve too, nobody get I’m twelve ‘less I

tell them. (11)

Precious’s strong sense-of-self registers in her mental repetition of her full name “to be exact.” Revealing that her obesity obscures her actual age, Precious is aware of her physical unintelligibility. Contemplating Precious’s unexpected youth, the nurse assumes that Precious’s premature sexualization eclipsed her childhood. The nurse’s comments come through Precious’ point-of-view: “‘Shame, thas a shame. Twelve years old, twelve years old,’ she say over ‘n over like she crazy . . . ‘Was you ever, I mean did you ever get to be a chile?’” (11). Precious declares that her girl subjectivity is not negated by pregnancy, and that she is, in fact, still a child, concluding, “Thas a stupid question, did I ever get to be a chile? I am a chile” (11, itals in orig.).

Within these confident past and present self-introductions, Precious’s age misidentifies her as too

“old” or too young for her life situations, situating age as a constant variable in establishing her identity. 184 Precious faces age confusion from others toward her pregnant, overweight, and sexualized body as well as within herself as the effect of traumatic memory. Because her trauma registers in temporal confusion, Precious uses age as an expression of agency to order her life story, as well as to manage extensive trauma into daily, micropolitical events. The first time

Precious writes her current age of sixteen is the first time we enter the present tense, almost twenty pages into the novel. After narrating a remembered scene where her mother sexually molests her by simultaneously manipulating Precious’ and her own genitals, the immediacy of the trauma is so strong that Precious states, “I’m twelve, no I was twelve, when that shit happen.

I’m sixteen now. For the past couple weeks or so . . . 1983 and 1987, twelve years old and sixteen years old, first baby and this one coming, all getting mixed up in my head” (21 itals in orig.). Equating subjectivity with temporality, Precious works to unravel her fragmented, nonlinear life history where, she summarizes, “all the time years is swimming in my head . . . all the years, all the me’s floating around. . . . All the days is gobbled together to make a year. All the years gobbled together to make a life” (38, 40, 109). To do so, she foregrounds age in summaries of major life experiences: when describing the onset and frequency of incest (“Seven he on me almost every night. First it’s just in my mouth. Then it’s more. He is intercoursing me.

Say I can take it. Look you don’t even bleed, virgin girls bleed. You not virgin. I’m seven” [39, itals in orig.]); when declaring her premature knowledge of insemination (“I’m twelve now, I been knowing about [pregnancy] since I was five or six, maybe I always know about pussy and dick” [12]); when summarizing her mother’s emotional and educational neglect (“If she ever said a kind word to me I don’t remember it. Sixteen years I live in her house without knowing how to read” [85]); when charting her therapy sessions with sexual abuse victims (“These girlz is my friends. I been like the baby in a way ‘cause I was only sixteen first day I walk in” [95]); when 185 reading the first note of encouragement given to her (“You’re only seventeen. Your whole life is in front of you. —Ms Rain” [71]); when realizing parenthood occludes extracurricular activities

(“It’s too late now. I’m eighteen. And Abdul a boy” [106]); and when realizing that the mystery of life is that hers still holds potential for growth (“Well I don’t know what life is all about either.

I know I’m eighteen, magic number” [108]). By stating her “magic number[s],” Precious supports her sense of self, a self that society believes “don’t exist” (32). Though celebrated alone and at a later date, Precious finds her birthday self-validating: “November was my birthday, I don’t tell nobody so don’t nobody know. But I light a candle for myself. I glad Precious Jones was born” (68).

Precious frequently states her specific age or the specific date as a focus on her everyday, micropolitical choices in the “now, right now.” After explaining how memory of her mother’s sexual molestation confuses her life chronology, Precious stabilizes herself by stating the current date, which notably repeats her age, and by focusing on her immediate task of washing dishes:

“I’m sixteen now. . . . But now, right now, I’m standing at the sink finishing the dishes. Mama sleep on couch. It’s Friday, October sixteen, 1987” (21, itals in orig.). In an interview, Sapphire comments on isolating the brief but essential late teen years for Precious’s characterization, so that “We enter her life at 16 and exit at 18. It’s a short time, but I think they’re the formative years in a teenager’s life” (Keehen). In this “short time,” Precious’ focus is on micropolitical expressions of agency and situational survival within the “days . . . [that] make a year,” rather than testifying to macro inequities of race, gender, and class both past and present. “Yet this is not to say that the characters are unaware of the forces of patriarchy or racism,” explains Reid, but that contemporary African American characters like Precious are “preoccupied with . . . decisions immediately in front of them” (323). Isolated, situational struggles spoken from 186 Precious’s uncensored point-of-view portray micropolitical expressions on the contexts of patriarchy and racism. Precious’s analyses and choices are never decentralized for qualification, sympathy, or contextualization on surrounding political histories, thereby diluting the girl’s perspective. Janice Liddell references Alice Walker and Toni Morrison as exemplifying how mid-century African American literature “where incest is an issue,” “the larger context of race and/or gender victimization is made central at the expense of the victimization of the girl-child”

(235). Instead, Push’s focus is on the “girl-child” where Precious speaks and negotiates incest in its day-to-day abuses and, in doing so, indirectly testifies to modern or historical gender and racial systemic injustice. Precious explicitly philosophizes this mode, disagreeing with the past and future-direction that the adults in her life demand: “Ms Rain always saying write remember write remember. Counselor say talk about it, talk about it—the PAST. What about NOW! At least wif school I am getting’ ready for my future (which to me is right now)” (115, itals in orig.). After Precious seeks counseling and tutoring from small non-profit groups and excels emotionally and academically, the social service system tries to reinsert her into a dead-end position as a “home attendint” “wiping ol’ white people’s ass,” thereby revealing to Precious a cycle of poverty and racial/class hierarchies. Rather than critiquing the reductive “new initiative on welfare reform” and “various workforce programs” through race and class contexts, Precious instead imagines what her daily life would be like in this program. She asks pragmatic questions about daily schedules, “When would I go to school?” and “How would I keep up with my reading and writing?”:

If I’m working twelve hours a day, sleeping in peoples houses, who will take care

of Abdul? The ol’ white people have [you] there all day and night . . . But you

only get paid for 8 hours (is the other sixteen hours slavry?) so that’s 8 x $3.35 = 187 $26.80 dollars a day, but then you is not really getting that much cause you is

working more than eight hours a day. You is working 24 hours a day at $26.80

divided by 24 is $1.12. (121)

Precious quantifies this complex social system with historical race and class reverberations down to its daily, minimal pay of “$1.12.” Refusing this job is a micropolitical statement whereby

Precious rejects racism and classicism without testifying to them directly. Precious concludes in her assertive, uncensored voice, “I ain been going threw all this learning to read and write so I be no mutherfucking home attendint” (121).

Within her experiences of racial injustice, Precious develops the trope of black invisibility by demonstrating how age shapes experience of the black body. In the novel’s climactic moment at the end, Precious reunites her racial “OUTSIDE” that society both despises and deems invisible with her perceived “lovely” “differ[ence] on the inside” by realizing that her interior is also a “beautiful . . .black girl” (125). She is therefore enabled to write conclusively about her anger and trauma. Precious declares that her anger centers on not being helped at a particular age. In her epiphany, she remarks,

I always thought I was someone different on the inside. That I was just fat and

black and ugly to people on the OUTSIDE. And if they could see me inside they

would see something lovely . . . and recognize me as … as, I don’t know,

Precious! But I am not different on the inside. Inside I thought was so beautiful is

a black girl too. But I am going to say what I am going to say. And then. I am

going to put it behind me and never say it again. I don’t blame nobody. I just want

to say when I was twelve, TWELVE, somebody hadda help me it not be like it is

now. (125, itals in orig.) 188 Precious places emphasis on the injustice done to her by those unwilling to help when she gave birth by repeating her young, vulnerable age of “twelve, TWELVE.” By stressing age in many of the novel’s key statements, she suggests that her racially invisible “OUTSIDE,” her appearance as “fat and black and ugly,” is shaped by this context of adolescent age. Here, and in other lists,

Precious foregrounds her derided teenage obesity, of being “fat” and “big,” as shaping her invisibility. Precious recognizes her invisibility in the media, particularly in stereotypes of the black teen welfare mother:

I big, I talk, I eats, I cook, I laugh, watch TV, do what my muver say. I can see

when the picture come back I don’t exist. Don’t nobody want me. Don’t nobody

need me. I know who I am. I know who they say I am—vampire sucking the

system’s blood. Ugly black grease to be wipe away, punish, kilt, changed, finded

a job for. I wanna say I am somebody. I wanna say it on subway, TV, movie,

LOUD. . . . I watch myself disappear in their eyes, their tesses. I talk loud but still

I don’t exist. . . . But I don’t care what anybody see. I see something, somebody.

(32-33)

While Precious inarguably deepens in self-awareness as she matures, she knows throughout that she is “somebody.” Precious struggles to reconcile her subjectivity, to “feel where I begin and end,” with the nonexistence society “sees” (31 itals in orig.). Precious’s girlhood body, including her experiences of HIV, sexual arousal, and obesity complicate prior notions of social erasure to highlight age as a context for racial invisibility.

Girlhood Biopolitics

In the following sections, I will connect representations of Precious’s girlhood body to

Girls’ Studies biological and sociological research. Precious’s girlhood age and subjectivity, 189 within a society destabilizing them, frame her experience of her sexual body. Her sexual arousal, sexually transmitted disease, and premature sexual development introduce new biopolitics to the

African American literary motifs of incest, literacy, and self-realization. These physical states cause slippage in her social signification as a teen girl, suggesting a new kind of female embodiment that is culturally unintelligible/invisible. Precious must speak from a different social position than previous literary characters as one who experiences a new bodily realism and irresolution. New Girls’ Studies scientific research on girls’ sexuality and sexual development adds salience and immediacy to Precious’s experiences. With these scientific parallels, I am not suggesting Precious has an actual biological existence, that she represents an entire socioeconomic racial group, or that my application of this science is exhaustive. Rather, I am supporting the newness of Precious’s representational body and, by extension, feminist authors’ recognition of girlhood subjectivity and sexuality, with scientific data showing the contemporariness of these girlhood physical states. Furthermore, I am also showing that Push adds to the generalized Girls’ Studies scientific data. Push suggests that the small body of research on adolescent arousal during sex abuse lacks a sustained portrait of how repeat abuse and arousal affects speech and written language acquisition. Push also frames the absence of social awareness of HIV in black teen girls as a social “narrative” absence, filling this erasure with Precious’s as well as many other girls’ writings. Finally, Push suggests that the issue of premature physical development from unhealthy food should consider instances where food is used as a tool of abuse, and parallels the biological repercussions of adolescent sexual abuse and teen pregnancy.

Precious declares that telling her story to the girls’ support group and, by implication, writing the text at hand, requires examining her bodily feelings and age: “To talk I have to tell 190 how I feel in my body. The war. My body my head I can’t say it right. How cum I’m so young and feel so old? So young like I don’t know nuffin’, so old like I know everything. A girl have her father’s dick in her mouth know things the other girls don’t know but it’s not what you want to know” (129). Here and elsewhere, Precious emphasizes how her “body” “feel[s]” (“but thas how I feel” [64 itals in orig.], “feel where I begin and end” [31 itals in orig.]), highlighting physical sensation which she explicitly voices throughout. Yet she vacillates between body and mind, physical feelings and mental “know[ledge],” as a conflict between youth and old age. This shows her internal disconnection, or “war,” as a result of premature sexualization. Precious struggles to narrate how her girlhood rapes make her “feel so old” emotionally, despite knowing that she’s “so young” biologically. Recent scientific research reveals that sexually abused girls experience an older “subjective age” than non-abused girls. In a scientific study of 44 adolescent girls between the ages of 12 and 19 years, the majority of whom had experienced abuse by a family member with the most frequent perpetrator being either a father or step-father, results show that sexually abused teen girls “felt significantly older than did their non-abused chronological agemates” as “clinicians noted that victims of sexual abuse often describe themselves as feeling older than they actually are” (Turner and Galambos 111). Participants’ responses to the statements “compared to most girls my age I feel” and “compared to most girls my age I look” (Turner and Galambos 112) corellate to Precious’ perceived older age as when she remarks “Sometimes I pass by store window and somebody fat dark skin, old looking . . . look back at me” (32). In this study, girls suffering from sexual abuse or “traumatic sexualization

. . . learn about sexuality long before their peers” (Turner and Galambos 117), a distinction

Precious makes between her girlhood experience of incest versus what she assumes non- victimized, “other girls don’t know.” 191 Yet Precious immediately realizes the community of girls surrounding her each have their own story of sexual abuse to tell. Extending the motif of a biopolitical “war,” Precious realizes that she, too, has an explosive story and can have an impact regardless of “what you want to know. It’s all kind girls here! They sitting in circle faces like clocks, no bombs. Bombs with hair and titties and dresses. After I sit here five minutes I know I am a bomb too” (129). Returning to the theme of temporality, Sapphire portrays the girls’ “faces like clocks” across “five minutes” of group time, this simile transforming into the unconventionally powerful image of feminized girls

“with hair and titties and dresses” like “bombs.” These images evoke both positive and negative timelines: the duration of adolescence until Precious tells her story as an explosive expression of her growing empowerment, as well as the duration of her illness as a destructive force in her deteriorating health. Sapphire closes the novel with Precious’s poem about HIV that also conflates the body with “tick[ing]” mechanisms: “Ms Rain say / walk on / go into the HEART of it / beating / like / a clock / a virus / tick / tock” (not paginated). In this scene’s context of common girlhood sexual exploitation, Precious’s narrative both represents and intersects with other girls’ stories. Precious’s bodily states of arousal during rape, HIV, and girlhood obesity convey new yet widespread biopolitics in teen girl bodies that rewrite feminist literary conventions.

Girlhood Biopolitics: Victim Orgasm and the Speaking/Feeling Sexual Body

Precious’s opening commitment to “tell the truth” in this novel since there is no “fucking use” with the “lies and shit out there already” states the need for, and the presence of, an uncensored and explicit voice (3). Push’s sexually explicit prose, often described as

“pornographic,” has been critically received as a necessary extension of Precious’s “voice that speaks the unspeakable” (Michlin 171) through an unmediated account that “tells incest in a new 192 way” (Doane 113). However, critics who analyze Precious ‘speaking sex’ focus almost exclusively on her telling the explicit acts of incest (“He slap my ass” [24]; “He squeezes my nipple” [24]; “He pump my pussy” [57]), rather than her telling the more explicit, and controversial, physical sensations of incest. If the first-person point of view of the incest survivor has a powerful, emancipatory effect by “tell[ing] the truth” against silencing forces, Precious’s descriptions of her feeling body also extend her speaking self. Critical silence on Precious’s sexual embodied feelings is shocking given her assertion that “to talk I have to tell how I feel in my body” (129). Her raw, graphic language of her physical sensations during intercourse acknowledges a sexually embodied girlhood. Experiencing any vaginal sensation during rape, such as pain, complicates the romanticized construct of the sexually innocent girl-child and the victimized, non-reciprocating (silenced) female body. Therefore, Precious’s sexual arousal and orgasms during rape shift conventional feminist representations of the incest survivor narrative.

Far from a simple equation where possessing sexual sensations equals emancipation, Precious writes of how her sexual arousal during abuse is the foundation of her shame and self-hatred in an otherwise confident and proactive self. Push’s incest narrative situates the feeling sexual body, rather than psychological self-invention or family drama, as a central trauma narrative in

Precious’s development. Beginning her talk therapy, Precious demonstrates this relegation of the family saga to the physical body: “I tell counselor I can’t talk about Daddy now. My clit swell up

I think Daddy” (111). Precious’s feeling body shifts the incest story’s focus on the power imbalances within the family or on the reconstruction of the self to the complex dynamics of the abused girl’s sexuality. Precious comments on her victimization: “Sometimes fuck feel good.

That confuse me” (35).

Despite Precious’s attempts to dissociate during incest, her orgasms force her into her 193 present “REALITY” (83). During a rape scene that parallels physical and sexual abuse,

Precious’s father animalizes her and uses her orgasms to justify his abuse. Whereas the scene begins with her silencing, Precious now voices her explicit sexual violation within the text at hand. She speaks the “unspeakable” acts of incest and victim orgasm:

He climb on me. Shut up! He say. He slap my ass, You wide as the Mississippi,

don’t tell me a little bit of dick hurt you heifer. Git usta it, he laff, you is usta it. I

fall back on bed, he fall right on top of me. Then I change stations, change bodies,

I be dancing in videos! In movies! . . . I’m your daughter, fucking me is illegal.

But I keep my mouf shut so’s the fucking don’t turn into a beating. I start to feel

good; stop being a video dancer and start coming. I try to go back to video but

coming now, rocking under Carl now, my twat jumping juicy, it feel good. I feel

shamed. “See, see,” he slap my thigh like cowboys do horses on TV, then he

squeezes my nipple, bite down on it. I come some more. “See, you LIKE it, You

jus’ like your mama—you die for it.” (24, itals in orig.)

Precious’s physical arousal and orgasm pull her out of media and celebrity dreams that distance her from the trauma, instead, back into the moment. Her normal physical responses to stimulation are framed negatively by the context of incest, and she equates “feel[ing] good” with

“feel[ing] shamed.” Precious’s agency is not completely erased given that she critiques the abuse as “illegal” and decides to remain quiet to deflect a beating. Yet her active, climaxing body is used against her by her father in an attempt to justify abuse. He concludes the rape with language that evokes Precious’s struggle with invisibility, “‘See, see . . . . See, you LIKE it.” His final offensive statement that Precious is sex-crazed, or “die[s] for it,” ironically foreshadows her

HIV/AIDS diagnosis. In a later graphic rape scene, Precious again emphasizes her self “HATE” 194 when “feel[ing] good.” She describes how “He stink, the white shit drip off his dick. Lick it lick it. I HATE that. But then I feel the hot sauce hot cha cha feeling when he be fucking me. I get so confuse. I HATE him. But my pussy be popping. He say, ‘Big Mama, your pussy is popping!’ I

HATE myself when I feel good” (57-58). In victim psychology, Precious transfers her “HATE” from the act to the abuser to the self, with emphasis on the physical “feel[ing]” self. Here,

Precious adopts her father’s male-centered language, “‘Big Mama, your pussy is popping!,’” when describing her intimate body, “my pussy be popping,” a description that candidly focuses again on her vagina.

In the one critical article recognizing Precious’s sexual climaxes, Elizabeth Donaldson emphasizes the linguistic aspect of Precious’s oppression, asserting that Precious’s father

“determines how she thinks of her orgasms and her sexuality,” making the primary argument of the novel, or “the central contradiction Push strives to resolve or at least to examine, [be about] a woman finding her identity, power, and voice while becoming literate in a language that in many ways encodes her oppression” (57). Because this is the one instance of Precious adopting her father’s sexual language during abuse, I do not consider language the primary means by which her father shapes her sexual self-perception in a novel that, otherwise, does centralize literacy, systemic and linguistic oppression, and the self. Rather, Push’s “central contradiction” is the conflation of orgasm, or “feel[ing] good” physically, with “HATE,” feeling bad emotionally.

This contradiction makes the reclamation of the feeling black girl body—the “OUTSIDE”

Precious must merge with racial self-acceptance “Inside” (125)— Precious’s primary goal. She partially reclaims her sexual body through literacy. After escaping abuse and focusing on her educational literacy and group therapy with other girls, Precious gradually accepts her physical desire and sexuality as normal. She thinks about telling her newfound sexual desire for “boys” to 195 Ms. Rain as a teen girl passing a “secret.” Precious reflects, “I have a secret. Secret is . . . I never have a guy, you know like that. It never usta be on my mind. All I want before is Daddy get the fuck off me! But now I think about that, you know, that being fucking a cute boy. I think about that and I think about being a poet or rapper or artist even” (109). Precious concludes this

“secret” by paralleling her desirous physical self to her artistic desires, showing that girls’ sexuality informs their creativity, an overarching concept in this dissertation.

The final primal scene in Push is portrayed through traumatic memory where Precious recalls her abuse and becomes involuntarily aroused, causing her to confusedly “want it back”

(111). Repeating the novel’s parallels of physical and sexual abuse, Precious is beaten during the rape yet summons the courage to not speak the words that her father demands. Instead, she wants to say that she is still a “chile.” Sapphire grants sexual subjectivity to the teen girl “chile” as

Precious explicitly outlines her orgasms:

My clit swell up I think Daddy. Daddy sick me, disgust me, but still he sex me up.

I nawshus in my stomach but hot tight in my twat and I think I want it back, the

smell of the bedroom, the hurt—he slap my face till it sting and my ears sing

separate songs from each other, call me names, pump my pussy in out in out aww

I come. . . . Say you love it! I wanna say I DON’T. I wanna say I’m a chile. But

my pussy popping like grease in a frying pan. . . . Then my body take me over

again, like shocks after earthquake, shiver me, I come again. My body not mine, I

hate it coming. (111)

Precious temporarily disowns her climaxing body, stating “My body not mine, I hate it coming.”

Yet she uses her sexually explicit voice—her desire to “wanna say . . . wanna say”— in the immediate next scene when she follows Ms. Rain’s mantra to “always write remember write 196 remember” (113). After the therapy session, Precious is “exhausted,” wondering “What kinda child gotta think about a daddy like I do?” (112). But she then draws strength from a class assignment to “memorize a poem” where she reinstates her agency by voicing her struggle.

Precious describes this equivalently therapeutic session, “I say my name is Precious Jones and this poem if for my baby son, Abdul Jamal Louis Jones. Then I let loose. . . . ‘Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair’” (112).

While there is a general lack of sustained critical research on sexual abuse and sexual arousal in youth, of the scholarship addressing this topic, findings on self-hatred and shame, blaming the body, perpetrator justification, and overall confusion correspond to Precious’s reactions. The focus of a 1998 study, titled “Sexual Arousal and Orgasm in Subjects Who

Experience Forced or Non-consensual Sexual Stimulation—A Review,” was to determine if sexual abuse “can lead to unwanted sexual arousal or even to orgasm,” a question that bespeaks the very newness, and possibly controversy, of this topic in the last decade (Levin and Berlo 82).

This article foregrounds the dearth of critical literature from which to draw: “A manual search of the literature in Pubmed under the headings sexual assault, unsolicited sexual arousal, did not recall any dedicated papers on the subject of sexual assault victims becoming aroused and/or orgasmic” (85). Therefore, this study’s primary data set became “Anecdotal reports (personal communications obtained by e-mail) from clinicians and senior nurse therapists all involved in treating/counseling victims of sexual assault [which] described unsolicited sexual stimuli creating sexual arousal and even orgasm” (85). According to the researchers, “Despite a limited published literature, case and anecdotal reports” show the occurrence of victim orgasm where

“[a]pproximately 1 in 20 women who come to the Clinic . . . for treatment because of sexual abuse report that they have had an orgasm from previous unsolicited sexual arousal” (85). The 197 clinicians believe the reports, though frequent enough to be significant, are low overall because victims are silenced by their shame, and the sense that their body has failed them: “It is not detailed in the (professional) literature because the victims usually do not want to tell/talk about it because they feel guilty, as people will think that if it happened they must have enjoyed it. The victims often say, ‘My body let me down.’ Some however, cannot summon the courage to say even that” (85). Precious’s reactions correspond to these instances of guilt (“it feel good. I feel shamed” [24]), as well as blame of and dissociation from the body (“My body not mine, I hate it coming” [111]). Yet Precious has the “courage to say” them. A specific quote from a clinician recognizes sexual arousal and orgasm in female youth, “‘I (have) met several female victims of childhood incest and rape who had lubrication and orgasm’” (85).

In a 2004 study exclusively on youth, clinical records covering one hundred sexually abused boys and girls ages 3–14 years—the majority female (67)— revealed that “Sexual arousal emerged as an important variable associated with both sexualized (self-focused) and interpersonal child behavior problems” (Hall, et al. 1045). While I will not pursue their connection between interpersonal behavior problems and sexual arousal within Precious’s characterization, I note this study for the salience of “sexual arousal in the child during sexual abuse” such that this factor became the number one schema for the study: “Four variables emerged as being most predictive of whether or not a sexually abused child would exhibit problematic interpersonal behavior: (1) sexual arousal” (1053). Yet these scientists note the dearth of critical scholarship on this topic, where their study “highlights new areas for empirical investigation which have been largely ignored in previous studies, such as, the role of sexual arousal and pleasure” (1054). These scientists even theorize that child sex abuse studies have only focused on one half of the equation, “The focus by professionals on the abuse in child 198 sexual abuse seems to have preempted serious study of the sexual part of the experience” (1054 itals in orig.). Trends in their analysis of child sex abuse and arousal repeat instances of self- blame and “shame” toward the body that we see in Precious’s representation: “These findings suggest that pleasure and arousal experienced by child victims during their sexual abuse may serve to increase self-blame . . . to a feeling of guilt and shame about his/her own natural bodily reactions” (1054).

Precious’s father uses her climaxes to justify his rapes, deflecting responsibility by framing Precious as an adult with adult bodily reactions: “See, see, . . . . See, you LIKE it, You jus’ like your mama” (24 itals in orig.). Scientists theorize that perpetrators may use childhood sexual arousal as a similar strategy to “shift blame,” though, unlike Precious’s father, through purposeful stimulation meant to arouse: “Given what we know about offender strategies for silencing victims and ensuring continued access, ‘grooming’ a child to experience arousal may be an effective way for offenders to shift blame for the abuse away from themselves and onto the child” (1054). As this area of child sex abuse research deserves more attention, researchers recognize common paradigms in inquiry that have overshadowed it, such as scientists’ focus on

“victimization” of the body and the “relationship” between perpetrator and victim”:

In the field of child sexual abuse there seems to be a tendency to focus on

victimization issues pertaining to the physical invasiveness of the abuse, the

relationship of perpetrator to victim, the level of physical injury, and so on, while

overlooking other potentially problematic elements such as the child’s

physiological and sexual arousal, his attributions of responsibility and his

thoughts and feelings associated with that experience. (1059)

I note these paradigms because they parallel common literary critical foci in the incest story on 199 patriarchal family power imbalances and victimization/violation of children’s innocence, foci that also ignore, and even deny, the girl’s sexual body and sexual responsiveness.

Precious’s arousal and orgasms during incestuous abuse shift feminist politics on the incest story to recognize girlhood sexual embodiment and psychosexuality, therefore redefining feminist constructs of “the girl.” To mobilize outrage against childhood sexual abuse, earlier feminist accounts cast the survivor as sexually innocent in order to emphasize a family power imbalance of dominant men who unfairly place blame on the conceit of seductive girls. I explore this exact construction in this dissertation’s third chapter on The Color Purple, analyzing Celie’s developmental and bodily “innocence.” Janice Doane summarizes this popular schema of girls’

“innocence”:

[F]eminist scholarship about incest often dramatizes children’s innocence: it

hopes to challenge an oppressively gendered discourse about seductive children

and adolescent girls that traditionally obscures the actions of powerful men. Yet

the result is “monster talk” about monstrous adults and innocent children, talk . . .

that denies all sexual feeling to the child. . . . The feminist incest story, whose

central focus was on the power imbalances within the family, insisted upon the

innocence of the abused child in response to dominant narrative that blamed

incest on seductive girls. (115)

Challenging a reductive portrayal of incest based on “innocent children,” Sapphire does not sentimentalize or desexualize Precious but grants her sexual feeling while still imbricating her in familial power asymmetries in the home. Sapphire likewise resists a binary sexual paradigm where young girls are either asexual or hyper-sexual (“seductive”) by portraying Precious with normal desire for boys and sex, and normal physical responses to intercourse. Rather than 200 making her a participant in abuse, these feelings further victimize her, complicate her trauma, and “confuse” her. Sapphire’s portrayal of developing psychosexuality and sexual embodiment in a girl not only shifts the incest narrative, but the larger narrative of idealized girlhood implicit in it. As Jenny Kitzinger points out,

Implicit in the presentation of sexual abuse as the “violation of childhood” is an

assertion of what childhood “really” is, or should be. The experience of abuse is

contrasted with the “authentic experience of childhood”: a carefree time of play;

an asexual and peaceful existence within the bosom of the family. The quality of

childhood that is most surely “stolen” by abuse is its innocence. (157)

By possessing sexual sensation during abuse, Precious destabilizes the conceit of ubiquitous

“innocence” in “the girl,” a conceit often deployed to support feminist theoretical arguments on

“violation.” Furthermore, Precious’s normal maturational sexual desire “to fuck a cute boy,” which grows during her recovery, destabilizes the “[b]elief in the child as essentially pure

[which] works to censor a child’s sexuality as deviant and provocative” (Doane113). In fact, across the novel, sexual politics are at play throughout traditionally “innocent” contexts like adolescent learning and nutrition, as Sapphire reshapes limiting constructs of girlhood as an experiential period. In keeping with this dissertation’s overarching argument that “the girl’s” position in feminist discourse has been erased, subjugated, and manipulated in early twentieth- century literature to privilege feminist arguments about women’s social position, I point out that sexual knowledge is a key characteristic associated with women rather than girls. In feminist discourses, maturity, autonomy, and individualism define the subject, and struggles, experience, and knowledge acquired in adulthood validate feminist consciousness. Doanne notes that sexual

“knowledge” is part of this binarism, “The active and ‘knowing’ female subject is usually 201 constructed in opposition to the innocent, good girl” (115). Precious has “been knowing about

[pregnancy] since five or six” and has “always know[n] about pussy and dick” (21.) By writing of her “active” teenage sexual body during abuse as part of her recovery, she represents a shift in feminist representations of teen girlhood sexuality and subjectivity. Provocative and proactive from the novel’s opening, Precious’s “refusal of innocence operates as a claim for agency”

(Doanne 115). Her ability to speak her sexual arousal during sexual abuse, to “talk about it, talk about it” (Sapphire 115) to the counselor, and to write about that experience in the text at hand, shows that “[t]he power of this vision resides in the conviction that raw experience can be represented” (Doane 124).

Girlhood Biopolitics: HIV and the African American Teen

Push engages critically in an intertextual dialogue with Alice Walker’s The Color Purple to contrast America’s racial and socio-economic exploitation of African American inner-city poor with black rural folk of earlier periods. In the struggling black neighborhood of a bustling cityscape, Precious’s grossly exploited body is an indictment of urban systemic failure and perpetuation. The educational system, with overcrowded classrooms and apathetic teachers, fails to teach Precious to read then holds her back as penalty for her pregnancies. The medical community fails to report her father’s sexual abuse and, after Precious is impregnated a second time, refuses to hospitalize her after her delivery. When Precious seeks counseling and tutoring from small non-profit groups, thereby excelling emotionally and academically, the social service system tries to reinsert her into a dead-end job that would preclude quality parenting and a living wage. Finally, the welfare system fails to recognize her mother’s misappropriation of Precious’s meager funds on unhealthy foods, leaving Precious to be abusively force-fed by her mother and, at other times, starve. As a result, when hungry, Precious turns to her city streets for food only to 202 find fast-food eateries which contribute to her obesity, and from which she must steal. As

Sapphire’s myriad urban racial exploitations modernize Walker’s plotline while thematizing inescapability, Sapphire concentrates all her direct intertextual references to The Color Purple around Precious’s contraction of HIV/AIDS. Sapphire’s intertextual references show that

Precious’s body materializes a new “REALITY” for the African American and feminist canons through HIV infection. Rejecting Walker’s utopic emotional, sexual, interpersonal, and financial conclusions, Sapphire offers no long-term solutions for Precious’s HIV/AIDS, ending the novel with irresolution. Precious questions in the end, “One year? Five? Ten years? Maybe more if I take are of myself. Who knows, who is working on shit like that?” (140). Unlike Celie, because of HIV, Precious never transcends the effects of her sexual assault, never achieves complete autonomy over her physical body, never fully celebrates her sexuality, and remains victimized within biological forces beyond her control.

Direct references to The Color Purple occur when Precious learns about her HIV and demonstrate a political shift from idealism to realism. Precious first identifies with Purple’s incest narrative and strives to also have a “fairy tale ending,” but later disidentifies with the novel once she learns she has HIV (83). Precious relates to Celie’s incest and illiteracy when the novel is taught to the girls as part of their literacy program, explaining, “I cry cry cry you hear me, it sound in a way so much like myself” (81, itals in orig.). Winning a literacy award and moving into a halfway house soon thereafter, Precious connects therapeutic reading to her personal progress: “I love The Color Purple, that book give me so much strength” (82). She equates these achievements with the independent idealism of the novel, such that “Things going good in [her] life, almost like The Color Purple” (82). However, after believing that life can have a “fairy tale ending,” Precious cannot entirely align herself with Celie’s idealism and reinforces 203 the harsh reality of her own situation: “Ms Rain say one of the critciszm of The Color Purple is it have a fairy tale ending. I would say, well shit like that can be true. Life can work out for the best sometimes. Ms Rain love Color Purple too but say realism has its virtues too. . . . I don’t know what ‘realism’ mean but I do know what REALITY is and it’s a motherfucker, lemme tell you”

(83). Precious’ “REALITY” immediately follows when Sapphire juxtaposes Precious reading an informational book on physically abused women to her previous comment on Purple. Here,

Precious notes that girls’ recovery is written out of contemporary nonfiction narratives that focus on “women.” Precious describes this alternative “book I read bout a battered woman. In a way I was a battered woman but I was not a woman—actually I was a chile” (83). She then realizes, “I never readed no book about a place for children, jus’ for grown-up women” (83). Yet she attempts to draw knowledge from this narrative erasure anyway, relating to how “this book [she] was reading was about a woman who got beat up by her husband. And she escape to a ½ way house” (83). With repetitive emphasis on “book” and “woman,” Sapphire implies that part of

Precious’s shift from political idealism to realism comes from recognizing girlhood narrative invisibility in one text and inadequacy in another.

In the immediate following scene, Precious is staying at a halfway house and her mother visits to tell her that Precious’s father has died of AIDS: “Mama say, ‘Carl had the AIDS virus.’

You know, so what, why you telling me. Then oh! No! Oh no, I get all squozen inside. Carl fucks me. I could be done have it. Abdul could be—oh no, I can’t even say nuffin’. A long time I don’t say nuffin’” (85). Usually verbally assertive and combative, Precious is silenced by the news and can say “nuffin.’” Resisting this information, she tries to destabilize her entire incest narrative by comparing it with The Color Purple’s plot element where Celie’s abusive father is ultimately not her biological father. Precious remembers, “Man rape Celie turn out not to be her 204 daddy” (86). She then asks her mother, “Carl, was he my real daddy? Was you married to him for real?” (86). The repetition of “real” invokes Precious’s earlier alignment with “REALITY,” and her mother likewise answers matter-of-factly, “He your daddy, couldn’t no one else be your daddy. . . . You better get tested” (86). In shock, Precious returns to her room and disidentifies with Walker’s novel: “I got Alice Walker up there [on a wall poster] with Harriet Tubman ‘n

Farrakhan. But she can’t help me now. Where my Color Purple? Where my god most high?

Where my king? Where my man love? Woman love? Any kinda love? Why me? I don’t deserve this” (87). Walker “can’t help” Precious any longer, as Precious feels unloved, alone, and without social or narrative reference to relate her HIV. Her flurry of questions, emphasizing irresolution, continues as she worries that the disease will impair her intellectual development,

“How I gonna learn and be smart if I got the virus? Why me? Why me?” (89). When medical tests show Precious’s son is not a carrier of the disease, Precious makes one final embrace of

Purple’s idealism though she cannot apply it pragmatically. Precious believes that god is omnipresent in all of the world’s beauty, as Walker’s Shug Avery theorizes, but Precious cannot find Walker’s spiritual aesthetics in her urban landscape. Precious summarizes, “Abdul get tested—he is not HIV positive. . . . there is a god. But me when I think of it I’m more inclined to go with Shug of The Color Purple . . . all that is god. Shug in The Color Purple say it’s a

‘wonder’ of purple flowers. I feel that even though I never seen or had no flowers like what she talking about. I’m not happy to be HIV positive” (139). Sapphire’s complex signifying on

Walker’s novel “clearly reveal[s] [her] debt to earlier black women’s narratives, while adding viable and sometimes compelling new perspectives” such as HIV/AIDS, thereby extending earlier literary conventions into contemporary politics of realism and irresolution (Reid 313).

Sapphire’s intertextuality exposes the narrative invisibility of black teen girls with HIV, 205 while her plotline—where doctors, teachers, and community members fail to inform Precious of or suspect she has the disease—exposes their social invisibility. In response, Precious makes her experience visible by writing about her AIDS through practice of her ABCs. In “The (Missing)

Faces of African American Girls with AIDS,” Nels Highberg outlines the absence of African

American girls in “master narratives” about HIV/AIDS that polarize the disease to homosexual men and Africans outside the U.S. When the disease is recognized in African Americans,

Highberg argues, pathologizing of the African American family occurs where pernicious stereotypes of the “down-low” male, who contracts AIDS through secret homosexual relations then passes it carelessly to women in open relationships, masculinizes the topic. Instead, “Where is the African American girl in stories about AIDS?” Highberg asks, and “why is it that stories detailing with the complex effects of HIV on the lives of African American girls do not seem to exist or, at best, are difficult to find?” (2, 6). She concludes that “in almost any discussion about

AIDS, the African American girl is marginal, appearing at the edges of the spotlight or residing in the wings of the stage. The eye rarely centers on her” (6). Push centralizes Precious as one such invisible representation, making her author her HIV positive identity into the text proper.

Precious’s first written piece about her HIV thematizes visibility and is her first journal entry where she signs off by adopting the title, “Precious Jones / the poet.” Precious writes of getting tested for HIV:

I talk to s___ wrk tody she gonn get tess for me

(I talk to social worker today she gonna get test for me)

an Abdul (se___ of God) to see

(and Abdul (servant of God) to see)

see the i 206 ey see [two-line drawing of human eye]

(eye)

see me

liv

(live)

or

die

poslv

(positive)

[………..]

Precious P. Jones (91-92)

Precious overdetermines concepts of visibility and personhood by rhyming “eye” and “I,” using

“see” to mean both recognize herself (“see me”) and receive medical test results, and by sketching an eye which alludes to her physical body, her subjectivity, and the all-seeing eye of

God. Precious challenges master narratives to “see the i / ey see,” or recognize the subjectivity she perceives, as part of “see[ing] me / liv / (live) / or / die / poslv / (positive),” or continue her fate as a living or terminally ill individual. Creatively authoring her experience where no narrative is available to her, she signs her name “Precious P. Jones,” adopting the phrase “the poet” written in her previous journal entry. Her teacher excitedly responds to this empowered title, not knowing the content of her poem references HIV: “Dear Precious POET Jones!

Awesome! I love your poetry and your drawings. What are you and Abdul going to see?” (92).

Precious’s following entry overdetermines issues of writing and narrativity by deconstructing the 207 alphabet to parallel expression of HIV with ABCs. She concludes the entry by asking Alice

Walker, whose narrative lacks AIDS representation, to simply “pray.” She writes,

Ms Rain

Mi and Abdul got a scrit

(Me and Abdul got a secret)

I tell you latr promois

(I tell you later promise)

no I tell yo now

IV HIV HIV U an Mi coold have HIV

(IV HIV HIV You and me could have HIV)

mi sun God Allh

(my son God Allah)

Alice Walk pra o IV VI YWXYZ

(Alice Walker pray oh IV VI YWXYZ)

I ah V I I H IH I HIV

HIV.

Precious P. Jones (92)

Precious first hesitates to write this experience but, in characteristic self-assertion, immediately declares “no I tell yo now.” Precious poetically fragments then reconnects “HIV” into “IV” and

“V I I H IH I HIV,” experimentally writing an unwritten concept from a teen girl’s point-of- view. She parallels fragmentation of “HIV” to the alphabet with “IV VI YWXYZ,” emphasizing both her developmental youth and her contrary position as someone learning “(positive)” and

“(negative)” personal traits of literacy and disease (91). She authors herself by rewriting her 208 name a final time, qualifying “Precious P. Jones” to now mean “pane / (pain) / Precious Pane

Jones/ (Pain)” (93).

Despite Precious’s social and narrative invisibility as an African American teen girl with

HIV/AIDS, and her intense isolation from lacking institutional support in nearly every facet of her life, Precious’s HIV/AIDS diagnosis reads as a collective experience. After Precious’s journal entries explore the possibility that she has contracted HIV, she first writes definitively that she has “got the AIDS virus” as a spoken statement to her girls’ literacy group. This ‘outing’ prompts Precious’s assimilation by these girls into two more girl therapy groups, one specifically for “HIV positive girls 16-21” (93, 138). With girls surrounding, supporting, and medically sharing Precious’s experience of HIV/AIDS, Sapphire reveals both a positive consciousness- raising network of girls and a negative prevalence of HIV infection in girls, the latter of which corresponds to recent data on HIV in the African American teen girl demographic. Precious first narrates that she has HIV in tandem with verbalizing it to her literacy group in the “Each One

Teach One” program: “I gotta learn more than ABCs now. I gotta learn more than read write, this is big BIG. This is the biggest thing to happen to Precious P. Jones in her life. I got the AIDS virus. Thas what tess say. We sitting in circle thas when I tell class” (93). As a critical observer of her personal and social situation, Precious writes in the third person that “[t]his is the biggest thing to happen to Precious P. Jones in her life.” She immediately tells the girls, “Nurse at clinic say to me, You are HIV positive” (93). Yet the girls’ reaction is delayed two full pages during which Precious briefly outlines the “life stories” of the other girls from their “dialogue journal[s]” as part of their “class project—LIFE STORY” (94). Precious does not prioritize her

“LIFE STORY” over the others but considers exploring, and experiencing, her troubles collectively. Precious speaks her HIV diagnosis through the second-person “You,” suggesting a 209 symbolic collective pain as well as literal shared experience in that one of the girls is also HIV positive:

“Nurse at clinic say to me, You are HIV positive,” I say to girls, we sit in circle,

some faces new, some the same faces from first day—Rita Romero, she hanged.

Jermaine still here, Consuelo gone. Rhoda still on set, some new girls—who is

like me when I first walk through the door. . . . When I hear Rhoda’s story, Rita

Romero’s story, I know I not the worse off. Rita’s daddy kill her mother in front

of her eyes. Rita been on the street selling pussy since she was twelve. Then

Rhoda’s brother raping her since she was a chile, her mother fine out and put

Rhoda, not brother, out. Consuelo in fantasy land. . . . Jermaine stayed on. She got

hard rock story too. Say mens beat her for what she is. Mother put her out house

when she fine out. These girlz is my friends. (94-95)

The stories that Precious summarizes here later close the novel in the form of direct entries from the girls’ journals, therefore offering “straightforward narratives th[at] provide ever more community of voices for us to consider,” such as inner-city and minority girls’ voices (Reid

325). Highberg recognizes these girls’ talking and writing groups as modes of political action, arguing, “For the first time in her life Precious has a personal support network that would not exist had she not taken part in this literacy program” thereby “[f]ollowing in the tradition of women’s clubs of the nineteenth century and the feminist consciousness-raising groups in post-

World War II United States” (13). Ann Stanford similarly notes that Precious’s alliance of girls generates critical discourses on female health and medicalization. In Bodies in a Broken World:

Women Novelists of Color and the Politics of Medicine, she writes, “Precious Jones and her classmates engage in a moral act of listening”; together, “they create new languages of resistance 210 and health” (125). As personal and political networks, the girls from “Each One Teach One” inform Precious of “Survivors of Incest Anonymous,” which she attends, and the “HIV positive girls 16-21” group.

Sapphire portrays Precious’s collective identity through girl collectives that empower her, through their stories that frame and intersect her HIV diagnosis, and through a theme of pervasive HIV infection wherein Precious meets as well as symbolizes an invisible mass of black

HIV positive girls. Sapphire’s emphasis on the ubiquity yet invisibility of the African American

HIV positive girl’s story corresponds to recent data that reveals this demographic as the fastest growing group to contract HIV in America. Precious is shocked by the commonness of girls with

HIV that necessitates a support “community.” Her personal revelation of HIV immediately transitions into a group experience: “But I look at my friends in the circle and I tell them, test say

I’m HIV positive. And all the tongues dead, can’t talk no more. Rita Romero hug me like I’m hr chile and Ms Rain rub my back . . . Then crying stop. Rita go to her purse and get magazine

Body Positive say I got to join HIV community like her. Jezus! It’s a community of them? Us, I mean” (96). Precious exclaims at the notion that her struggle is shared by many, including Rita

Romero, and shifts her perspective from external, “them,” to inclusive, “[u]s.” Precious’s story parallels alarming data from the Centers for Disease Control that reveals racial and age discrepancies in the disease which position African American teen girls as a prominent group affected by HIV/AIDS. According to a CDC report released in August 2008, there are 126,964 women in the United States living with AIDS, with African American women accounting for 64 percent of the total (2008). The report states: “The rate of AIDS diagnosis for black women

(45.5/100,000) was approximately twenty-three times the rate for white women (2.0/100,000) and four times the rate for Hispanic women (11.2/100,000).” This report also reveals that, among 211 African American women, HIV/ AIDS continues to be the primary cause of death for those aged

25–34 (2008). A mortality rate in the mid-twenties to mid-thirties bespeaks an earlier age of initial infection. Statistics from New York state isolate these earlier years, specifically the teen years, as accounting for close to half of all initial infections, with a significant percentage of remaining infections occurring just past age twenty. This release, titled “The Face of the Virus Is

Changing,” states, “About 40 percent of new infections in women of color are among girls aged

13 to 19, and 32 percent are among young female adults aged 20 to 24” (Taylor 11). Despite this statistical demarcation of black teen girls and young adults as the majority (72 percent) of new

HIV contractions, prompting this study’s emphasis that “the face of the virus is changing” to a younger face, critical analysis of HIV/AIDS still reads “women,” not “girls.” For example, a

2004 study in The Journal of Black Psychology titled “African American Women and AIDS:

Factors Influencing Risk and Reaction to HIV Disease,” analyzes factors effecting how “African

American women represent the fastest growing group of individuals infected with HIV in the

United States” (McNair and Prather 106). Yet the study groups adolescents and adults together as one sample of “African American women aged 14 to 44 years” (McNair and Prather 109).

Precious’s story of HIV/AIDS pens an invisible demographic in media and research through her collective identity. Sapphire describes how the character of Precious is based on her literacy work with inner-city minority teen girls, and is a “composite” of real girls and real untold stories of HIV. Precious is “a composite of many young women I encountered when I worked as a literacy teacher in Harlem and the Bronx for seven years” (Keehnen). In another interview, she goes into further detail: “She was a composite. Although while I was teaching, I did meet a young woman who told me that she had a baby by her father when she was twelve. I thought, How do you get up from that? . . . Then, later, she told me she had AIDS” (Marvel). 212 Sapphire concludes, “I realized she, like most of the women in that class, was never gonna be able to tell her story” (Marvel). Precious “tell[s] her story” as a symbolic collective authorship, as well as tells her story alongside other girls’ written voices as shown in the novel’s concluding section. Push’s final 36 pages (unpaginated) comprise the “class project—LIFE STORY” that

Precious and her peers wrote during the “Each One Teach One” program. Here, Precious writes poetry about her HIV while others address their varying life situations including sexual abuse, poverty, rape, hate crimes, and HIV infection. This section answers, in part, Highberg’s frustration with the lack of “stories” and “representations” of this major demographic of HIV victims: “If African American girls comprise one of the groups most directly affected by HIV, then where are their stories? Why do so few representations of them exist? And how might their experiences inform what we know about HIV and its treatment?” (6). Precious authors her story of intersecting racial, age, and medical invisibility where, she comments in the AIDS awareness girls’ group, “At least when I look at the girls I see them and when they look they see ME” (138, itals in orig.). This newfound visibility prompts her to declare, “The meeting is good, it’s for

HIV positive girls 16-21.” Direct references to Alice Walker’s The Color Purple surround

Precious’s HIV diagnosis, and demonstrate a shift from earlier literary modes of idealism and conclusiveness into realism and irresolution. Precious’s HIV narrative resists a utopic ending, honoring the life and drive in Precious and—by extension— real girls’ effected by HIV/AIDS, while also recognizing Precious’s terrible fate if these girls remain invisible socially and narratively. Precious ponders: “I think how alive I am, every part of me that is cells, proteens, nutrons, hairs, pussy, eyeballs, nervus system, brain. I got poems, a son, friends. I want to live so bad. I got this virus in my body like a cloud over sun. Don’t know when, don’t know how, maybe it hold back for a long long time, but one day it’s gonna rain” (137 itals in orig.). 213 Girlhood Biopolitics: Obesity and Premature Sexual Maturation

Childhood and teenage obesity obscure Precious’s ages by causing her to look physically older. Rather than an isolated physical characteristic, Precious’s obesity intersects with her premature sexualization. Sapphire thematically parallels Precious’s sexual abuse and dietary abuse, juxtaposing her molestation with force-feeding, and her obesity with pregnancy.

Furthermore, Sapphire chronologically parallels Precious’s premature sexualization and her early physical development. Precious gave birth at twelve, implying that she entered puberty through menses at a young age, and Precious was obese at twelve, demonstrating physical maturation at a young age through sex characteristics such as her prematurely large breasts. Sapphire’s narrative conflation of early sexual development and obesity creatively evokes new findings in biological studies which show that “girls in the United States, especially black girls, are starting puberty at a younger age,” and that “obesity is an important contributing factor to the earlier onset of puberty in girls” (Kaplowitz, et al. 2001, 347).

Precious first reveals her obesity, and how it misidentifies her age, when in labor.

Responding to an ambulance driver’s question, Precious replies that she is “Twelve” and thinks

“I was heavy at twelve too, nobody get I’m twelve ‘less I tell them. I’m tall. I jus’ know I’m over two hundred ‘cause the needle on the scale in the bathroom stop where it don’t go no further.

Last time they weigh me at school I say no. Why for, I know I’m fat. So what. Next topic of the day” (11). “[N]obody” recognizes that Precious is an adolescent because she weighs “over two hundred pounds.” Despite not knowing her actual weight, Precious retains some agency by refusing to be weighed, declaring “I know I’m fat.” Despite her flippancy in this scene,

Precious’s obesity affects her perception and experience of her body, as shown in her frequent remarks, “I wish I wasn’t fat but I am” (96). Precious’s obese body makes her look older and 214 shapes her sense of racial invisibility: “Sometimes I pass by store window and somebody fat dark skin, old looking . . . look back at me. Who I see? I stand in tub sometime, look my body, it stretch marks, ripples. I try to hide myself, then I try to show myself” (32). In a scene where she ponders her racial invisibility and “disappear[ance] in their eyes,” Precious manipulates her flesh, deciding whether “to hide” or “to show” herself as an expression of her self-perception.

Precious references her mother’s manual sexual abuse while in talk therapy and her oral sexual abuse in sporadic instances of distress when she imagines “the smell of Mama’s pussy in

[her] face” (117). Yet the novel’s one extended depiction of maternal sexual abuse is framed by excessive force-feeding. Despite insisting that she’s full by telling her mother “I’m not hungry,”

“I don’t want no more,” and “I’m so full I could bust,” Precious is verbally and physically threatened to return to the kitchen three times to refill her and her mother’s plates with food (20-

21). Precious describes the rich foods and her exhaustion from forced, repetitious “eating”:

“Greens, corn bread, ham hocks, macaroni n’cheese; I eat ‘cause she say I eat. I don’t taste nothing. . . . Eating, first cause she make me, beat me if I don’t, then eating hoping pain in my neck will go away. I keep eating till the pain, the grey TV light, and Mama is a blur; and I juts fall back on the couch so full I feel like I’m dyin’ and I go to sleep like I always do; almost”

(21). Conflating physical and sexual abuse, Precious nearly faints from the forced binge eating at which point her mother begins to molest her until Precious finally wills herself to pass out:

Almost go to sleep; it’s the pain in my shoulder keep me from totally conking out

this time. I feel my Mama’s hand between my legs, moving up my thigh. Her

hand stop, she getting ready to pinch me if I move. I just lay still, keep my eyes

closed. I can tell Mama’s other hand between her legs now . . . go to sleep, I tells 215 myself. Mama’s hand creepy spider, up my legs, in my pussy. God please! Thank

you god I say as I fall asleep. (21, itals in orig.)

Sapphire juxtaposes sexual and dietary invasion of Precious’s body. She extends this motif to

Precious’s protruding stomach from both obesity and pregnancy. When realizing that her mother noticed she is pregnant and is about to confront her, Precious’s fragmented thoughts parallel her pregnant belly to her consumptive belly. Precious observes, “She been staring at my stomach. I know what’s coming. I keep washing dishes. We had fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, and Wonder bread for dinner. I don’t know how many months pregnant I am” (9).

Precious’ obesity obscures her state of pregnancy, making her “stomach,” again the point of focus, appear later-term. Here, Precious emphasizes how she is “big”: “I look down at my stomach. I’m some big now. I’m only seven months but I look like nine. I mean I am big. Scale just stop at 200 but I know if it a different scale like hospital scale it just keep going” (63 itals in orig.). Conflating her baby weight and overall weight, Precious wonders if she will be smaller after delivery because “[t]he staircase so skinny both sides of me touch when I’m going down the stairs. Maybe after I have baby I lose some weight” (23).

Precious’s premature sexualization, including her adolescent pregnancy and her advanced sex characteristics shown in her obese, developed body, correspond to contemporary changes in girls’ pubertal development. Scientific data shows that the most dramatic of these changes occur in the African American adolescent demographic. Biological research on female adolescence shows that girls’ puberty is starting at younger ages with “twice as many girls reaching puberty at age seven than a decade ago,” and with more than twice as many black girls (43%) as white girls (18%) entering puberty early (Coghlan 1). Measuring the onset of menstruation and the development of breast size in girls, the most recent focus of these findings connects increasing 216 rates of obesity in children as a key influence (Kaplowiz, et al. 2008, 209). Andy Kaplowitz’s

2008 study, “Link Between Body Fat and the Timing of Puberty,” states, “Several recent studies suggest that the timing of the onset of puberty in girls has become earlier over the past 30 years, and there is strong evidence that the increasing rates of obesity in children over the same time period is a major factor” (211). In a corresponding 2010 study, Frank Biro’s team examined

1,200 girls ages 7 and 8 in Cincinatti, New York, and San Francisco to determine which girls had started puberty. In an interview by WebMD about his study, he states, “Ethnicity plays a role in earlier puberty,” because “We found that girls who are African-American matured before whites, and that’s been shown in several studies” (583). He argues that girls who have relatively higher body mass index are more likely to have earlier menses, and establishes relationships between body mass index and other measures of pubertal onset. Overall, Biro’s study “suggests that being overweight, both as a young child and growing up, makes girls more likely to enter puberty early” which “could be a matter of the actual nutrients girls get from their diets” (Reuters

Health). Sapphire never references Precious’s onset of menstruation, but reepatedly emphasizes her youthful pregnancy and delivery, as when the nurse attributes the child’s Down Syndrome to

Precious’s youth, stating, “you’re so young, things happen more to the very young” (17).

Precious’s binge eating and her generally unhealthy diet recurs when she steals large amounts of fast food: “I grab chicken and roll, turn, run out, and cut down one-two-six stuffing in my mouth.” These instances are frameworks that suggest overall poor nutrition (37). Sapphire’s conflation of sexual and dietary excess in youth, while not meant as a biological argument, nonetheless creatively encapsulates a disturbing pubertal trend for contemporary African

American girls. 217 Conclusion

Using Girls’ Studies biological research on African American girls’ earlier menstruation, increasing HIV infection, and arousal during sexual abuse, I shows that Precious’s complex biopolitical embodiment in Sapphire’s Push shifts feminist politics on the incest story to recognize girlhood sexual embodiment and psychosexuality. Precious acquires knowledge of her

HIV/AIDS with her ABC’s, making Precious’s trauma writing express new biopolitics in the teen girl body. Furthermore, Precious self-consciously reflects on the act of writing and on herself as a writer/“poet,” offering a confident character voice who combats intersectional injustices through written and spoken assertions of her age, girlhood, and girl sexuality. Yet

Precious’s physical states cause slippage in her social signification as a teen girl, suggesting a new kind of female embodiment that is culturally invisible, thereby highlighting gender and age as intersecting racial invisibility. Precious writes, speaks, and feels her girlhood psychosexual subjectivity thereby offering an outspoken, proactive, sexually-aware, socially-critical, and situationally analytical characterization that represents new twentieth-century feminist politics.

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